Broadcast News · reception & legacy
1987 · James L. Brooks
How Broadcast News has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A critical darling on release — seven Oscar nominations, including all three leads — it famously won none, and has since aged from 'smart 80s rom-com' into something regarded as prophetic about the infotainment-ification of TV news.
What's debated
The ending is the eternal fight: Tom or Aaron (or neither), and whether the film's refusal to give Jane a conventional romantic resolution is its masterstroke or its cop-out.
Its footprint
Albert Brooks's catastrophic flop-sweat anchoring scene is one of the most referenced sequences in comedy, and lines like 'I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time' and Aaron's 'What do you think the Devil is going to look like?' speech still circulate constantly.
Where it stands
A Criterion-anointed touchstone that cinephiles routinely rank among the smartest American comedies ever made — the default answer to 'what's the great movie about journalism that isn't All the President's Men.'