from the opening scenes, tenderly showing the childhood of each of the three main characters, broadcast news may seem a simple and comfortable romantic comedy but as the story unfolds the more that initial notion turns into certainty that this film is something else entirely.

those characters presented at first and their interactions are the guiding line of the story. they grow up to work together in a broadcasting company and despite their differences they all have one characteristic in common—the fulfilment they take from their work, each one in their own specific ways, is bigger than what they get from romance.

they’re all fully developed and naturally flawed. the mistakes they make happen naturally within their nature and are never written to simply keep the plot going. they don’t have clear cut, specific narrative functions, there’s no clear heroes or villains. tom, the closest thing the film has to an antagonist only is so because he, in a somewhat involuntary way, represents what jane understands as the menacing new media. nevertheless he destroys that perception (at least until a certain point) by being extremely self aware and open about it. he knows and recognises from the beginning that he’s not smart or prepared, that he only got the job because he’s charismatic. that self awareness is from where much of his admiration for jane comes from because, besides the fact that she’s clever and extremely well adapted to her job, she’s right about him. he knows that! and tells her that! and asks for help to improve!

that fact that people act like actual people makes broadcast news a refreshing romantic comedy, to a point that it is an anti romantic comedy in a sense. many of the genre’s classic tropes are used, as the love triangle, enemies-to-lovers, friends-to-lovers but none of that comes to fruition in a conventional way, at least on screen. the characters, like many times in real life, don’t get to choose love, even if they’re romantic people in their core.

the film is also very clever in its use of the relationships and setting to construct an extremely rich subtext. it approaches many themes: how people relate to work; how it is for a woman to excel at her job to a point she compartmentalises so much she has a hard time figuring out her feelings; how media changes with time, how everything is a story and how to tell it, what is the meaning of ethics in media; how attraction is not something you can rationally control.

these last two topics are fundamental to the conclusion of the film. jane has a very specific idea of what’s right, from which tom radically deviates from but she doesn’t see that what she does isn’t that all that different. humans perceive events as stories and, even if she praises ethics and objectivity, she also told stories that were charged in some way, even in the action of choosing which story should be given time and which shouldn’t. she puts herself in this higher place but doesn’t realise that it isn’t that much higher than where he stands.

when the conflict between jane and tom happens it has a lot to do with a breakage of confidence. the way he used an important story that was despised by other men, inserted his feelings to produce a deliberate effect is completely against everything jane believes in and, in that moment everything she felt for him changes. the way she got moved by the story was the reason why she changed her mind about him decided her to act on the attraction she felt all along, and when that went away all the love she could’ve felt went away as well.

9/10