The Hack should have been TV gold: written by Jack Thorne (who also wrote the Emmy-winning Adolescence) and co-produced by ITV Studios, the team behind Mr Bates vs the Post Office. It is – looked at one way, at least – a story about an underdog, fighting a hugely powerful and corrupt machine. It even stars Toby Jones as the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, looking about as unlike Alan Rusbridger as it’s humanly possible to look. You can almost hear the television executives’ hands being rubbed together with glee. Alas, this gold has been alloyed with nickel.
Jones is presumably there to add an air of seriousness and dignity, a counterbalance to Nick Davies – David Tennant, rangy and grey in a questionable wig, with an uncanny English accent – whose dogged investigation uncovered the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. He’s the hack writing about the hack, geddit? Tennant’s Davies is one of those awful but brilliant men (“He may be a total dick, but he’s impressive,” says his ex-wife), pig-headed and smug. He’s easy to admire; harder to like.
When we meet him in 2008, Davies – a freelance journalist who to all intents and purposes works for the Guardian – has recently released a book about sloppy story-finding and illegal practices in journalism. He appears on the Today programme to promote it, opposite the then managing editor of the News of the World, who quickly dismisses allegations of widespread dodgy dealings: sure, private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and the paper’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, had been found guilty of illegally intercepting voicemails, but that was the extent of it. Shortly after the show airs, Davies receives a call from an unnamed source (Adrian Lester): the phone-hacking scandal was not just a few bad apples, and what has been uncovered so far isn’t even the half of it. Hacking is, the source claims, “endemic”.
We then follow Davies – and his beleaguered-but-brave editor and friend, Rusbridger – as he doorsteps lawyers, speaks before parliamentary select committees, tries to get to grip with sprawling legal cases and makes an awful lot of phone calls. It’s not naturally the most dramatic of material, but Thorne does a reasonable job of keeping up the pace.
Running alongside this is a second strand, a cold-case investigation into the 1987 murder of the private investigator Daniel Morgan, led by DCS Cook (the inestimable Robert Carlyle). These two stories – Davies and Cook – will eventually come together, but for its first four episodes The Hack alternates between them. A lazier choice, perhaps, than the task of weaving together these two apparently disparate threads into one narrative arc. But my real problem with this conceit is the total tonal disconnect between the two.
Moving from episode to episode is like watching entirely different shows. DCS Cook’s strand is pure police procedural. Meanwhile, the episodes telling Davies’s story have a zippy, zany feel. There are fleeting cameos from the likes of Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Ross and Harry Hill. Tennant breaks the fourth wall, interjecting to explain certain events or production decisions – more Adam McKay (think Margot Robbie in the bath in The Big Short) than Fleabag. A source’s name is bleeped out, and Davies turns to camera: “Redacted.” Newspaper front pages appear with the mastheads “News of the Screws” and “Currant Bun”, and Tennant explains that the show obviously didn’t get the rights to use the real brands. The jokes don’t always land, but as a stylistic choice it avoids clunky exposition in dialogue or in type across the screen.
But The Hack’s true flaw is that its victims for the most part lack the empathetic draw of the Post Office scandal. The politicians, royals and entertainment stars at the heart of phone-hacking scandal are in no way as sympathetic as the Everyman subpostmasters who lost their reputations and livelihoods at the hands of literal and corporate machines. Nick Davies’s efforts produced essential and brilliant journalism, but the injustice they righted was all too abstract, without Mr Bates’s ordinary, beating human heart.
[Further reading: The Summer I Turned Pretty’s drawn out climax]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate