If you’ve followed the news today, you’re probably just as depressed as me by the German election results, with actual fascists having gotten 20% of the votes, and the majority of Germans still having voted for the less fascist yet conservative party CDU. Don’t expect any progress in this country. And that’s just German politics, let’s not even mention the sheer insanity that is going on in other countries.

Well, needless to say, I’m not a fan of reading the news anymore. I gave up on that years ago, because it’s just absolutely horrible for my mental health. Attention-grabbing social media platforms fed by algorithms that keep you scrolling are pretty much the worst thing that came out of the internet. When I noticed how miserable they make me all the time, I gave up on them.

Considering my current attitude towards news, I realize that the latest TV show I finished watching was a very odd choice: the Australian show The Newsreader. I’ve seen this show recommended a few times on /r/televionsuggestions, and three factors led me to add it to my watchlist: It’s set in the 80s, it has Anna Torv (from Fringe) and it has Sam Reid (the best Lestat ever in Interview with the Vampire).

I’ve been enjoying 80s and 90s movies lately, probably because the world was not going to shit so much back then, and things were just simpler. Watching that is remembering how times were back then – a world without smartphones and social media to keep you hooked to a screen all day. So many things that I still remember, but haven’t seen in decades! Landline phones! Answering machines! VHS tapes! Typewriters!

The Newsreader starts in 1986 and tells the story of young, aspiring producer Dale Jennings, and of experienced newsreader Helen Norville, as they go about their jobs creating the network television news program News at Six based in Melbourne, Australia. Helen has a reputation for being ‘difficult’, but somehow, Dale ends up helping her through a rough patch, and they team up. The show tends to use major events in international and Australian politics to tell their stories, and ends with the major worldwide news event of 1989.

I admit it took me a few episodes to get into, mainly because of my current attitude towards news. It was a bit alienating for me to watch a show about people chasing the next big story. The next big story means the best ratings for their shows. Is that so different from chasing likes and followers on an instagram reel? The difference is of course the time and effort it took back then to actually make a good story. You needed a camera crew, and then you needed to take your actual VHS tapes to the cutting room to cut them, and then play them during live television, all of which seems like vastly more effort to me than filming something on your phone and quickly editing it on your computer before posting it on the internet.

However, the characters of this show quickly grew on me as I kept watching. Helen is a great conflicted newsreader with a no-bullshit personality, and you always get the sense that there’s more to her than it seems. This is confirmed in the third and final season, when it is revealed that she actually suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. Seeing her deal with that in the judgemental 80s is quite intense.

She’s not the only one having to deal with discriminating attitudes; Dale is a character that just comes off as a super wholesome, somewhat naive guy struggling with his sexuality. He doesn’t really want to admit to himself that he’s attracted to men as well as women for fear of losing his job over it, because apparently in the 80s you could get fired for being openly gay/bi?

Let’s face it, 1980s Australian is a straight white man’s world, and these two characters have quite a lot of shit to deal with, perfectly illustrated by this beautiful screenshot from the show’s final episode.

However, one of the things that makes this show so great is that not even Helen or Dale are perfect. They might have secrets that could cost them their job, but they are still both white Australians, and they both show internalized racism despite having the best interest of people at heart. One example where we can see this is in Helen’s dealing with her Aboriginal sources. She wants to represent them and shed a good light on them, but still lets slip internalized racist remarks.

The other characters of the show are a whole different league, and the amount of really horrible racist, homophobic and misogynist remarks that are casually flung around this office are insane. Probably somewhat normal for the 80s, but really absolutely insane. Among the news crew are also people of color and women, who obviously have to suffer the most from this. Most notable is Noelene, a Korean woman who works harder than everyone else in the office, but never gets the recognition for it, and is often called Chinese, Japanese, or any other type of Asian. She somehow married one of these racist people, gaslighting herself into a marriage with a casually racist guy who just doesn’t seem to know better.

The show kept playing with my expectations, and pretty often went a different way with its story than I expected. I admit that the third season became increasingly unhinged, and some things were quite over the top. Still, it was nice how the story came full circle in the final episode, and we got a somewhat satisfactory conclusion for most characters.

It shows that some things were definitely better in the past, and things seemed less insane. But some things were definitely a lot worse, and I think The Newsreader does a great job at looking at a lot of social issues for which, even though they progressed quite a lot in the past 40 years, there is still a lot of progress to be made. And let’s face it: 20% of German voters would probably approve of the abhorrent racism, homophobia and misogyny that this TV show from the other side of the world portrays. Maybe society hasn’t really progressed as much as we’d like to believe.