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EVERY GENERATION has its voice of sanity. In the 1950s when the McCarthy witch hunts threatened the same freedoms it claimed to safeguard, America had the esteemed news anchorman Edward R. Murrow. In the 1970s when the oil crisis, the Watergate scandal and the unwinnable war in Vietnam shook American self-belief, it was the unimpeachable anchorman Walter Cronkite. In the early decades of television, the audience looked to news anchors to help them understand the world. Anchormen were solid, trustworthy, the foundations of a world that made sense.

But the world grew bigger and scarier, and then it was no longer enough to have the news delivered on TV every night. There were too many questions and unsatisfactory answers. Those in charge were hiding things; the people didn’t know whom to trust anymore. So they turned to someone who did not claim to have all the answers. Not only did he not profess to know the truth, he even described his nightly broadcast as a fake news show. He shared the audience’s anxiety, and he dealt with this anxiety by laughing in its face.

Read our TV column, The Binge.

Our column in BusinessWorld on Friday is about BBC One’s spy drama The Night Manager starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki. (Tobias Menzies is in the trailer!) Here’s a preview for the Hiddlestoners, who are legion.

Hiddleston is the boyfriend of the Internet, and his every smile and gesture is analyzed and rendered as GIFs on Tumblr. He was an electrifying Coriolanus in the Donmar Warehouse production that was broadcast live in cinemas, and a contemplative Henry V in The Hollow Crown. He has been the handsome, rather diffident foil to the luminous Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, the fabulous Tilda Swinton in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and the ferocious Jessica Chastain in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

Hiddleston made the ladies more scintillating through his presence, but in each case his character seemed weak and not in charge of his own destiny. They seemed like iterations of his most-recognized role to date: Loki in Marvel’s Thor and Avengers movies. While technically a villain, Loki is too adorable to fear or hate: he’s a naughty schoolboy rebelling against his parents. Good for Tumblr and writers of fan fiction, but limiting for such an intelligent and gifted actor. He needs a character who is free to be himself, unshackled from the past, who owns his own flaws and bad decisions. Then he will become the star his online legions expect him to be, in the league of Redmayne and Cumberbatch. Will The Night Manager be that role?

Read our column, The Binge.

Wake up!

Maeve Dermody and Aidan Turner in Agatha Christie’s And then there were none

Before long they start dying one by one, and no one suggests that they all stay in one room to watch each other. However, at some point they search the rooms, giving Aidan Turner an excuse to take off his clothes. I am not making this up. So he’s leaning against the door, smouldering so hard I feared the wallpaper would combust, clad only in a towel so you can count his abs and slice your retina on his hip cleft. He goes on wearing just the towel long after the search is over, and all I can say is, Five stars for the Beeb! I have not read the Agatha Christie source material, and I strongly doubt that she wrote the towel scene, but who cares. Cover your granny’s eyes, this may kill her.

Read our TV column, The Binge.

NO ONE was more excited about the return of The X-Files than I was. In the 1990s, that show was my life in an alternate universe. I never met a limb-stretching serial killer who killed people and stole their livers, then hibernated for 30 years in a nest of newspapers, but Tooms was an improvement on some people I knew. (At least Tooms admitted he was a monster.) I did meet some of my favorite people because of The X-Files — they would send me unsigned letters sealed with an X in aluminum foil. On my radio show we would spend an hour discussing the latest episodes, particularly the progress of the Fox Mulder-Dana Scully relationship, whether David Duchovny broke out of deadpan, and whether he could be legally compelled to wear the tiny red Speedo more often. (Obviously we had no advertisers.) Hell, I read Gravity’s Rainbow because it was the subject of Duchovny’s doctoral dissertation.

In case you are very young or were in a cult during the ’90s, The X-Files was about FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder, whose obsession with extraterrestrials and paranormal phenomena began with what he believes to be the abduction of his younger sister by aliens when he was 12. The FBI puts him in charge of the X-Files, the department which looks into weird, unexplained occurrences, then assigns Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as his partner. Scully, a skeptic, a pragmatist, and a medical doctor, debunks Mulder’s theories at first, but as the series progresses she becomes a reluctant believer. It helped the series that its two stars had mad chemistry — I, for one, am still waiting for them to announce that they’ve been together all this time.

Read our TV column The Binge.

Uro dela Cruz, who died on Thursday, was a brilliant fictionist, screenwriter, film and TV director, photographer and amateur anthropologist. He was 64. He had shelves full of awards, including seven Palancas, that he was grateful for but did not talk about. Crowing about his achievements embarrassed him — the important thing was the work, and even that he barely discussed. It became a running joke: ask him how many TV shows he was directing at the same time, and he would say, “None.” “You don’t direct Bubble Gang anymore?” we would press him. “That show practically directs itself,” he would shrug. After we had peeled away layers of semantic obfuscation, we would learn that in addition to the comedy show he helmed for two decades, he was directing two game shows and a sitcom starring Manny Pacquiao. No wonder it took him ages to reply to texts and phone calls.

All these accomplishments — the shows ranging from Battle of the Brains to Bubble Gang that defined pop culture and Pinoy humor (he wanted to set up a website called Wackipedia as an archive of jokes); the now-classic films he wrote, including Virgin Forest and Scorpio Nights; the amateur urban archeology that led to a trove of photos by Teodulo Protomartir; the novel Antyng-Antyng (Kwadrisentenyal), which remained unpublished until we kidnapped the manuscript and sent it to a publisher — these are sidebars to the life of Rosauro Quevedo Dela Cruz of Lucban, Quezon. What Uro really excelled at was being a human being. He was a devoted husband to Anna, who runs the household with military precision, whom he described as the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. He was a terrific father to Tata, Toto and Dodong, whom he deprived of any issues they can report to a psychiatrist later in life because they could talk about everything. He was a marvelous friend — kind, generous, deadpan funny, fiercely intelligent, a human Google of arcane knowledge, and he would be the first to point out that there are too many adjectives in this sentence. Uro was one of the finest people I’ve ever known. It’s all downhill from here.

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