Stream It or Skip It?

Good Night, and Good Luck: Live from Broadway (now on Netflix) reasserts George Clooney’s message about the necessity of the fourth estate. His snapshot drama of CBS news reporter Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 media battle with Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy originated as a 2005 film, Good Night, and Good Luck, which Clooney directed, acted in and co-wrote with Grant Heslov; it earned six Oscar nominations, including for best picture, and best actor for David Strathairn. Released during the heat of the Iraq War, the film’s message about holding power to account was relevant, and 20 years later, that message is even more poignant during a time when truth itself is under siege amidst a social and political quagmire playing out in a wildly different media landscape – likely why Clooney revamped the script for Broadway, with himself playing Murrow this time. Perhaps it’s ironic that Good Night, and Good Luck: Live from Broadway originally aired July 7, 2025 on CNN, but one thing’s for certain – it wouldn’t have aired on CBS. And for that reason alone, this story still packs a timely punch. 

The Gist: Clooney, as Murrow, opens Good Night, and Good Luck with a monologue addressing how the media, especially television, is a tool for hard truths that people don’t want to hear, and that it’s also for entertainment, which audiences inevitably prefer. The lights come up and the scene is the CBS newsroom in 1954, bustling with activity. Network honchos want employees to sign affidavits claiming they’ve never had any affiliations with communist organizations. This is the Red Scare at work, and it was initiated by Republican senator McCarthy – depicted here, as in the original film, exclusively in real-life archival footage – who routinely levied false accusations at hundreds of members of the U.S. government. 

Murrow, producer Fred Friendly (Glenn Fleshler) and the news team behind Murrow-anchored show See It Now meet in a cloud of newsroom cigarette smoke and decide to pursue a story about Air Force lieutenant Milo Radulovich, who was discharged for not disowning family members accused of having communist ties. The story sparks a battle between Murrow and CBS chief William Paley (Paul Gross), who worries not only that Murrow and his team are editorializing more than reporting, but also that the show will lose its corporate sponsor. Even military reps pressure CBS not to run the story, but they do anyway – and despite nervousness among sponsors and network brass, receive significant public support from it. 

Murrow’s team powwows again, knowing that they’ll be targeted, their backgrounds investigated; reporter Joe Wershba (Carter Hudson) shares that his ex-wife went to some meetings years ago, which prompts more worry than his breaking network policy by secretly marrying co-worker Shirley (Ilana Glazer). But they’re all in on putting McCarthy’s ass to the fire, so Murrow airs a report in which he responds to a variety of McCarthy’s public statements by pointing out the senator’s lies, factual errors, inconsistencies and contradictions. CBS allows McCarthy to respond, so he sends them a filmed spiel in which he accuses Murrow of being a communist without a shred of hard evidence, because the guy known for falsely accusing people of being communist without a shred of hard evidence has no other play. I mean, maybe he was too stupid to realize the gun he was wielding didn’t have any bullets in it. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Let’s just be grateful that they didn’t turn it into Good Night, and Good Luck: The Musical, like they did to Mean Girls and Heathers.

Performance Worth Watching: Clooney delivers Murrow’s direct-address TV monologues – inevitably punctuated with the movie/play title, his signature sendoff – with significant confidence, knowing that they’ll hit home here and now in the shitshow Trump era.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Clooney originally intended to play Murrow in the film, but felt his persona didn’t jibe with the level of world-weary gravitas that someone like Strathairn could project. Well, like the rest of us, he’s 20 years older now and in the midst of some fresh, hot, stinking American political turmoil, so the weariness comes with minimal effort. On stage, he has bags under his eyes that are likely makeup but are nonetheless convincing, playing a character who’s a pivotal player in American politics, and on the cusp of making a little bit of history. There’s a lot of weight on Murrow’s shoulders, but he’s also bolstered by the strength of his convictions, and Clooney expresses that balancing act mostly wordlessly, outside the dialogue, with significant dramatic oomph. 

The film version of Good Night, and Good Luck was mostly a busy-busy-busy chamber piece playing out in a few rooms at CBS. Its translation to the stage is a more complex, fairly technical production, with vintage black-and-white bubble-screened TVs blowing up Murrow/Clooney’s signature close-up monologues for the theater audience; he also “banters” with interview subjects in archival footage culled from Murrow’s real-life programs. On an elevated platform, Georgia Heers plays Ella Fitzgerald, delivering vocal-jazz interludes during scene breaks. The reproduction of the newsroom is cluttered with gear and overstuffed with people, amplifying the sense of tension. It’s easy to see why the play earned a handful of Tony nominations for its convincing mise-en-scene.

Although the immediacy of the film version lends itself to more potent drama than a Broadway production captured by cameras – an added layer of dilution – one still senses that the stakes are high, that the ideas being conveyed are as important now as they were 70 years ago. One highlight is when Clooney and Clark Gregg, as newscaster Don Hollenbeck, share a moment in which the latter earns a big, shake-your-head-in-disbelief laugh line when he says, “It feels like all the reasonable people hopped a plane to Europe and left us behind.” The people in this newsroom represent a lot of Americans with their feelings of paranoia and unease.

The core ideas of Good Night, and Good Luck feel, well, huge here in 2026. McCarthy calls his critics a “jackal pack,” which is quaint considering the current state of political rhetoric. Letting McCarthy hang himself with his own words actually persuaded the American public that he was a heel, and the hard, persuasive logic of it feels like a pipe dream. In a rare flourish in the play’s translation to screen-based media, there’s a shot of Clooney/Murrow in which he slowly fades from color to black-and-white, and the implication is, Murrow’s brand of bold journalism is a thing of the past. Of course, his partial editorializing walked a thin, fragile line that has all but shattered in modern times as journalism has been weakened and compromised by grotesquely partisan news outlets in an ongoing information battle that wavers wildly from food fights to nuclear war. 

Clooney’s closing monologue is backed by a visual montage of TV clips from the past several decades, from JFK to I Love Lucy to Jerry Springer, OJ and Iraq to Jan. 6 and “alternative facts.” It’s grim, and Clooney’s delivery reflects that. What would Murrow think, say, do about the events of our present? We’re left hanging, pondering that thought.

Our Call: Clooney’s frowning, contemplative face says it all. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.