Billie Piper, Keeley Hawes and Romola Garai round out a posh cast for Philip Martin’s Netflix feature about journalism, privilege and sexual exploitation.

Scoop is a dramatized feature about the BBC’s Newsnight team scoring a sensationally revealing 2019 interview with Prince Andrew about his relationship with millionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. For a film about a journalistic exclusive, it has the most generic title possible. There are already at least four other movies out there called Scoop, including a rubbishy 2006 Woody Allen film and a 1987 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s peerless 1938 satirical novel, a twofer satire of both the press and the British aristocracy.

In an odd way, Scoop feels more like another example of Netflix feasting on the British royal family’s dirty laundry now that The Crown has gone as far into the present as it can go (or dares to go).

At its worst, it comes across as another sanctimonious victory dance on the reputational grave of one more semi-shamed patriarch, like a British version of Bombshell, about the toppling of Fox News’ Roger Ailes. Which is always nice, but less the exercise in truth-telling and journalistic virtue-signaling than it thinks it is, and more of a showreel for skillful makeup work that transforms one set of actors’ faces into another set of famous faces.

Kudos are at least due Kirstin Chalmers’ hair and makeup design for transforming Anderson into Maitlis and Rufus Sewell into Prince Andrew, although once you notice how much Sewell’s version of Andrew here resembles former vice president Mike Pence, especially during the climactic interview, you can’t unsee it.  

Neither of the aforementioned are the audience’s main point of identification. That honor goes to booker McAlister, played by Billie Piper, whose role is to wrangle interviews for Newsnight. Oddly, the film doesn’t mention that the real McAlister, an executive producer here, was originally a barrister, perhaps because that might have muddied the way she is presented as a brassy, working-class, tabloid-skewing square peg plugged awkwardly into the round holes of the BBC newsroom, where colleagues see her as “too Daily Mail.”

The prince, Thirsk and his courtiers are keenly aware that Andrew’s longstanding friendship with Epstein and the latter’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell isn’t going to be forgotten, especially since photographs by paparazzo Jai Donnelly (Connor Swindells) show Andrew walking in the park with Epstein in 2010, two years after Epstein had been convicted and served time for pandering and solicitation.

When Epstein is re-arrested in 2019 and the royal connection starts getting aired all over again, especially the infamous photograph of Andrew, a then-17-year-old trafficking victim named Virginia Giuffre and Maxwell upstairs at Maxwell’s London flat, Andrew and his aides believe this might be an opportunity to spin the story in his favor. All are convinced that the supposed charm of the “Queen’s favorite” will somehow work its magic even on famously tough interviewer Maitlis.

In fact, in some ways Thirsk emerges as the most tragic character in the story. A well-meaning woman in what’s mostly a man’s world — not unlike Maitlis, McAlister and Newsnight’s chief editor Esme Wren (Romola Garai) — Thirsk seems to be suffering from the employee version of Stockholm Syndrome, so acclimatized has she become to seeing things through the eyes of Andrew, the other royals and their retinue.