Holy roller

Enlarge Image

Ken Finkleman (POSTMEDIA)

TV preview

Good God

• Starring Ken Finkleman, Lolita Davidovich, Jason Weinberg and Samantha Bee
• Monday at 10:30 p.m.
• Movie Central

Enlarge Image

Prayer circle: Samantha Bee, from left, Stephanie Anne Mills and Finkleman in Good God.

George Findlay is back where he belongs. And that means Ken Finkleman is back in his element, too.

George, of course, is the onscreen alter ego created and portrayed by Finkleman in a half-dozen different darkly insightful TV comedies dating back to 1995's Married Life and his 1996 made-for-CBC breakthrough The Newsroom.

Neurotic, self-obsessed, nervous, scheming, unintentionally nasty and very intentionally willing to cut corners and toss the odd colleague under the bus if it means a slightly better deal for himself, George has explored various aspects of the film and TV production business during his amusingly unstable existence.

In the new Movie Central series Good God (not to be confused with Finkleman's last effort, Good Dog), George's serially self-serving career journey has come full circle, landing him back in a TV newsroom -- although this one is about as far, in philosophical terms, as he could get from the left-leaning, sort-of-fictional version of CBC he inhabited in The Newsroom.

In Good God, which premières Monday at 10:30 p.m. on Movie Central, Findlay has taken a job as the head of a new right-wing Canadian news network fashioned after the massively successful U.S. cable outlet Fox News.

As always, it's a decision guided by personal greed rather than professional aspirations. George's latest girlfriend, socialite Virginia Hailwood (Lolita Davidovich), is the daughter of an insanely wealthy media mogul, and daddy offered George the job.

"(It's) a job I wouldn't take if someone held a gun to my head," George explains early in the series première. "But then he held money to my head, and I accepted."

Once not-so-comfortably ensconced at Right News, George immediately sets out to do what he does best -- and worst: generally ignoring the urgent needs of the fledgling network operation so he can focus obsessively on the trivial details that will satisfy his personal wants and needs.

In the first few episodes of Good God, the newsroom is in a constant state of chaos as the various right-wing wackos hired to write and deliver its Christian/conservative version of "news" engage in personal crusades and beyond-offensive rants, but George's is fixated on making sure he gets the private washroom he was promised in his contract.

Without question, Good God harkens back to the very best of The Newsroom's humour, mixing flat-out absurdity with the sneaky kind of social commentary that always seems to arrive from an unexpected direction.

In a telephone interview this week from his Toronto home, the Winnipeg-born writer/producer/director/performer said it's actually harder than one might think to satirize right-leaning news outlets like Fox News and its real-life Canadian cousin, Sun News Network.

"It's a little bit tough, because they're their own best parody," Finkleman, 65, explained. "The political discourse in the U.S. has not only gone so far to the right, it also seems not to feel any need to be able to stand up to scrutiny. It has lost any interest in what's actually true.

"I think the same is true in Canada now -- with the Harper government, you're seeing a tremendous amount of that, a deep cynicism among these people on the right who run for and gain power. They really feel that the end justifies the means in their ideological ambitions and manoeuvres. They'll say anything, without any feeling of responsibility to the truth. It's a pretty frightening development."

Even more alarmingly, it's the sort of environment in which a guy like George Findlay could actually start sounding like the voice of reason. Despite that disquieting notion, Finkleman said that after Good Dog, which focused on Findlay as an urbanite and an older gent involved with a younger woman, it was time to take George back into the workplace.

"The reason that last series wasn't quite as funny was that I entered into a world that was not filled with lies and deception," he reflected. "It didn't particularly fit well with my comic sensibility. ... I think I'm a lot more on my game when I'm in a world that's about this kind of stuff -- the news."

Interestingly, Finkleman's return to a fictional newsroom comes just a few weeks before the premiere of Aaron Sorkin's new TV drama, HBO's The Newsroom, which focuses on the inner workings of a 24-hour news network.

Finkleman said he's OK with the idea of Sorkin (The West Wing, Sports Night) borrowing his title.

"HBO's legal department called me about that, actually," he laughed. "I told them, 'I don't think you really had to call me, because I don't think a title like that is copyrightable.' ... I think they were concerned because they knew about my show and they were worried that when people try to get their show online, they might end up getting my show instead of theirs. I told them that's their problem, not mine."

Finkleman added that he sees a distinct difference between what Sorkin is trying to accomplish with his dialogue-driven drama series and what he's after with Good God's subversive comedy.

"I saw the trailer for (Sorkin's) The Newsroom on YouTube," he said. "What it seems that he's attacking is how the discourse in the mainstream media has been pushed so extremely far to the right, and the tremendous fear in America, as the empire crumbles, of being critical of it.

"Aaron Sorkin is a dramatic liberal, and I think (The Newsroom) is going to go over well with the liberal HBO audience. But it's not my style -- I'd rather not show the guy who's embraced the truth; I prefer taking the low road, showing the lie through guys who are telling the lies. ... Revealing the lie is funny enough; I don't need to point out the truth."

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 7, 2012 G1