The Hack review: Phone hacking scandal drama wants to tell a bigger story

There are moments we all remember from the News of the World phone hacking scandal that engulfed British media almost 15 years ago.

The gut-churning revelation that journalists illegally accessed and tampered with the voicemail messages of 13-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler. That the practice was widespread and encouraged, and not isolated to a couple of bad apples.

That video of Wendi Deng lunging across the room to save her then husband Rupert Murdoch from the indignity of being pie-d by a protester.

The phone hacking scandal was one of the defining stories of the 2010s - but most of us only have half the picture.

It was easy to get caught up in the headline-grabbing bits of celebrities such as Sienna Miller, Hugh Grant and Elle Macpherson, royals and politicians having their privacy violated, and to condemn the media company responsible.

But what didn’t get as much scrutiny, at least globally, was the role of the Metropolitan Police, and its lack of action and even, on some occasions, corruption.

TV series The Hack has a wider lens than the top notes, as it digs into the nitty gritty of how such a crime could be perpetrated against not just the thousands of direct victims, but what it revealed about inter-related institutions as a whole.

This is sometimes cerebral, sometimes enraging and almost always compelling TV – and written by Jack Thorne, who along with Stephen Graham, created and penned Adolescence, so you know this is someone who can weave the personal with the big picture, state-of-the-nation stuff.

The Hack starts off with two storylines. The first follows Guardian journalist Nick Davies (David Tennant, a real-life phone hacking victim), who has his nose in uncovering the phone scandal story, but is facing all kinds of opposition and challenges.

The rest of the British media, including titles not owned by the Murdoch-controlled News International (since rebranded as News UK), steadfastly refuses to get involved and follow it on while the self-regulated press council and the Met Police continues to argue there’s nothing else to answer for beyond the two lone convictions for phone hacking some years earlier.

Davies and his editor, Alan Rusbridger (Toby Jones), knows it was endemic – and very much in the public interest given the former editor of News of the World, Andy Coulson, was now seated next to Prime Minister David Cameron as his communications chief.

As the team pursues the story, it becomes clearer just how tangled it is between the media, the police and the political establishment as each sector works with the other to benefit their agenda, or because they fear the repercussions if they don’t play nice.

A description of how the tabloids could set out to “monster” any detractors will genuinely make you feel gross.

The other story is that of detective chief superintendent Dave Cook (a very good Robert Carlyle), who is working on a renewed investigation into the 1989 murder of Daniel Morgan.

Among the chief suspects is a private eye, who also works with News of the World and the cosiness of that link will become apparent as Cook is harassed at every turn, even when driving his kids to school.

The way these two stories eventually intersect drives home that there was another side to the scandal that wasn’t resolved by the Leveson inquiry, a corporate rebrand or James Murdoch being forced out as the sacrificial lamb.

The law enforcement failures – the years the Met held onto evidence, the unwillingness to investigate, the cops who sold confidential information about even their own ranks to private investigators engaged in illegal acts – are damning.

It’s a clever storytelling technique to weave the two strands, especially if you want to highlight the stakes to anyone who might downplay the whole thing as some famouses getting their feelings hurt. Plus, the Morgan investigation side is drawing on a true crime case, and we know the audience for that is robust.

The quibbles would be that it is one or two episodes too long and the time jumps between varying points from 2002 to 2012 can be confusing.

It feels like there could be a bigger purpose to The Hack beyond rehashing a scandal from more than a decade ago. Most of what happened was aired out during the Leveson inquiry, and News of the World was shuttered, arrests were made and jail terms were served by myriad people involved, including Coulson.

But there was supposed to be a second inquiry, informally known as Leveson 2. The first part looked at press standards and the follow-up was to examine the relationships between the media and the police.

Cameron’s Tories abandoned Leveson 2 so there was never a full reckoning. The media is supposed to hold law enforcement accountable, and, in the case of illegal acts such as phone hacking, vice versa.

At the time, the chair, Lord Leveson, said the decision broke a promise made to the phone hacking victims while the Labour opposition called it a “breach of trust”.

If the filmmakers behind The Hack is advocating for a renewed push to complete this work, the emotional impact of a TV series is a way to start.

The Hack is streaming on Stan.