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Ronan Farrow’s painstaking investigation makes the transfer to television, underlining the blind eyes and NDAs that left the movie mogul free to harm women for decadesThis six-parter on Sky Documentaries is the latest iteration of Ronan Farrow’s work on exposing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual predator. Farrow began his investigation as a reporter for NBC. When that network refused to air his reporting (they claimed it wasn’t in a fit state, but the suspicion has always been that they too became one of the many institutions unwilling or unable to withstand Weinstein’s intimidatory tactics), Farrow took his story to the New Yorker who published his exposé in October 2017. In 2019, his book Catch and Kill was published, which detailed not only Weinstein’s crimes but the astonishing lengths he had gone to to try to stop Farrow’s investigation, including having the reporter trailed by members of the Israeli security firm Black Cube. That became a podcast, and the podcast has now become an HBO docuseries about the film producer who – for decades – used his power and influence to sexually harass, assault and rape women.Except it hasn’t, really. It’s become a filmed podcast. You could close your eyes for the entirety of the three episodes made available for review – and I imagine the remainder – without losing anything of note from the experience. It is mainly interviews with the people involved in the investigation, be they survivors of Weinstein’s predations, such as Rowena Chiu – whom he attempted to rape in 1998 when she was a 24-year-old assistant at Miramax – or fellow journalists who helped Farrow build his case, like Ken Auletta and Kim Masters, who had both come frustratingly close to unmasking him years before. Visuals tend towards transliteration – a closeup of the buttons on a receiver when people are speaking about a phone call; a police badge when a woman reports her experience to the NYPD; swirling ink in water when someone settles down to write. None of it illuminates or adds anything to the story. Continue reading...