‘The Hour’ is generally time well spent

Combine a hopeless idealist, a producer with brains and beauty, and on-screen talent with movie-star good looks in a period news setting fraught with ethical challenges and you get ... “Broadcast News.”

Oh, wait, no -- that’s the 1980s film with William Hurt, Holly Hunter bursting into tears and Albert Brooks whining a lot.

You also get “The Hour,” the new Golden Age of Television production on BBC America.

“The Hour” finds Freddie, a passionate young reporter who is too smart for his own good. He wants to find the story behind the story and his sharp mind is usually capable of doing so. He knows what’s going on, what’s happening and what’s next on a broad range of topics. Sadly, he is always stuck doing newsreel on society events for his go-nowhere boss.

Freddie’s friends with Bel, a beautiful young woman and journalist who manages to rise to the level of producer despite a near constant barrage of blatant sexism in the workplace. She’s been tapped for the BBC’s new topical news program, “The Hour.”

As such they’re both saddled with the upper class standout news reader Hector Madden. Not much to say about him except he’s gorgeous, married and hitting on Bel. Naturally, Freddie’s not a fan.

“The Hour” opens with some sort of underground scandal Freddie gets tangled up in when a debutante former girlfriend comes into information she shouldn’t have and passes it along when Freddie’s putting newsreel together. He isn’t in a good position to follow it up, but then people start turning up dead – an academic politico, the debutante herself. Freddie finds a message in a secret cigarette paper retrieved from the scene of an assassination and what can this mean?

Freddie doesn’t know, but he means to find out, if he can be taken seriously for a moment. Unfortunately, his brash, investigative style clashes with what his bosses are looking for in their newscopy, but there may be an opportunity to escape. Bel wants Freddie to join her in putting “The Hour” together, and, freshly sacked from his copydesk at the BBC, it’s the best offer on the table.

What’s going on?

I can’t pretend to have any idea what’s going on with this show. The names and references are fleeting and foreign – there was a Kennedy and Eisenhower reference that nails it down as being definitively postwar. I do enjoy the period flavor of the show and a lot of the themes it explores.

It feels to me like the underground assassinations have been seeded in to add dramatic flavor of a blunt and somewhat pandering nature for a show otherwise unafraid to traffic in subtleties – the lives and times of talented young journalists testing the limitations of reporting in a brave new medium might not be sufficiently interesting for a television premiere, I take it.

The concern is the same as every story in which journalists are trying to investigate crimes themselves. Crime-solving moves stubbornly along at its own pace, reporters generally don’t have the resources of a local constabulary and in the meantime you have these things called “deadlines” where you’ve got to actually produce copy and present it to the public. And that kind of show-so-far crime reporting, referred to as “process” writing, isn’t going to keep editors interested for any length of time.

There’s a reason why we have police officers and we have reporters, and it is because they do different things.

In the case of “The Hour,” Freddie is also investigating police coverups of domestic espionage, however, which is a bit more promising, but he’ll probably have to keep those society matrons on speed rotary for the time being.

New episodes of “The Hour” premiere Wednesdays at 10/9c on BBC America.