'The Loudest Voice,' the Roger Ailes docudrama starring Russell Crowe, is political masochism theater

It's a special time to be an evil white man.

On some fronts, there's been a reckoning. Powerful men in Hollywood have been ousted from power, women are speaking up about inequality and misconduct, and workplaces around the country are striving for inclusivity.

But in other areas — how do we say this? — it's the same old shit. A known harasser holds the highest office in the land while an alleged pedophile pursues reelection. Even the men we consider ourselves done with continue to hold a perverse fascination, their names popping up again and again in conversation or on celluloid.

Such is the case with Roger Ailes, the Fox News C.E.O. who resigned in 2016 after being accused of sexual assault, and whom we now have to think about again — I guess so Russell Crowe can try to win an Emmy. Ailes is the subject of Showtime's The Loudest Voice, a seven-part docudrama that premieres Sunday. While it's an illuminating look through recent political media history in hindsight, it also feels like gratuitous attention for a man who positively thrived on it. It's a way to make his voice, its effects still reverberating through the years, even louder.

Based on Gabriel Sherman's 2014 biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, the series follows Ailes' life and career from the launch of Fox News in 1996 to his resignation in 2016. (Episode 2 is a 9/11 flashback complete with footage of people jumping off the Twin Towers, and this review is more warning than the show will give you for that.)

The Loudest Voice is not objectively bad. It's a well-made series with a decent budget and acclaimed actors, some of whom are doing their best to embody people who are still alive and well and were up to these antics just years ago, if not still. (No doubt forthcoming episodes leading to the Trump era will be especially uncanny.) Crowe's makeup is distracting, but you get used to it (kind of like with Christian Bale in Vice) and also to his irate, gravely voice as it spits orders at those Ailes considers beneath him (spoiler: That's everyone). Where Adam McKay's Vice, about the career of Dick Cheney, opted to lean in to pedantry and features a hyperstylized edit (including a fake-out ending and regular interludes of Cheney and others talking to the camera), The Loudest Voice presents its nasty-man-in-power narrative without flair, keeping clinical distance from its subject.

There are plenty of women in Ailes' orbit, with convincing performances from Naomi Watts as Gretchen Carlson, Annabelle Wallis as Laurie Luhn, and Sienna Miller as Ailes' long-suffering wife, Beth. Beyond that, it's hard for the show to give dimension to women who are either manipulated or complicit in Ailes' tyranny, since he remains the focal point. Wallis' scenes are particularly tough to watch as she soldiers through repeated sexual abuse and tries to normalize it.

While it's useful to see just how deliberately Ailes manipulated the American people in his business interests, there's an unshakeable sense throughout The Loudest Voice that it's commodifying our current media and political cesspool while we're still drowning in it daily. We know that there are bad people in power and that the wealthy and powerful have been pulling the puppet strings over our oblivious heads for years. We don't need to keep hearing it when we could be fighting it. We don't need to be revisiting Ailes' life and treacherous legacy when the consequences continue to unfold before us.

At the same time, peak TV and streaming have proven that conversation can lead to action. Netflix's When They See Us, about the wrongful rape conviction of the Central Park, has been viewed by more than 20 million people worldwide, bringing the suffering and injustice of that story to an international platform. The Loudest Voice may be trying to do the same, but it's a mistake to turn the spotlight onto the villain instead of his victims. Like Vice before it, the show seems determined to stir outrage when there's no lack of it in the public discourse — outrage at systems and people whom most of us have no chance in hell of changing. Ailes built an empire on fanning flames, so I suppose it's fitting that his story would do the same.

The Loudest Voice airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showtime.