David Farnor | On 28, Sep 2025

“The logic of journalism has become overwhelmed by commercialism.” That’s the blunt assessment of the media by Nick Davies (David Tennant) at the start of The Hack. ITV’s drama about the phone hacking scandal at News International is a hot-blooded takedown of the worst of the news practices of the early noughties. Nick, a freelance journalist for the Guardian, unearthed the malpractice involving reporters hacking into celebrity’s voicemails to get scoops and secrets – all with disregard for privacy, security, the law and, well, basic human decency.

David Tennant is on blistering form as Nick, who wastes no time in telling people like it is – only for nobody to pay attention whatsoever. What begins as the gradual pulling at a thread of corruption soon becomes a full-on cover-up in response to Davies’ determined digging – and that frustration, in a neat move from writer Jack Thorne, springs off the screen into a fourth-wall-breaking narrative device.

His asides to camera and imagined Tube adverts are at once distracting and engrossing – they keep us deliberately unsettled, ruffling our feathers while also breaking up chunks of exposition and moral diatribes into something more entertaining and stylish. Even the opening monologue is rewritten over and over in real-time, which sets the playful but focused tone.

There’s no getting round the suspicion that this self-aware approach is partly to disguise a very slow-paced saga, but that suspicion is mostly overcome by the casting of Toby Jones in a key supporting role as former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. Jones is eminently watchable doing anything, and his muted, mostly sat-down performance here is a grounding presence that complements Tennant’s more energetic outbursts.

Together they make for an engrossing double-act in what ITV will no doubt hope to be this year’s equivalent of Mr Bates vs the Post Office – if not TV’s answer to All the President’s Men. This isn’t on a par with the latter, but it’s refreshing to have a grown-up drama tackle questions of ethics, the media and truth seriously, without feeling the need to simplify it all. The scandal at hand is a more abstract challenge than Watergate or Post Officegate, but that makes the programme all the more important, as we also follow DCS Dave Cook (Robert Carlyle) investigating the murder of PI Daniel Morgan – and begin to see not only how crime, money and the media can be connected, but also why these things are in the public interest.

In an age where critical thinking and being alert to misinformation is increasingly crucial, The Hack is a reminder to not be lazy processors of regurgitated information, but to pause and think about where the news we consume is coming from. It’s only weakness is that the phone-hacking scandal almost feels tame in comparison to how much the media landscape has changed since.

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