AllMovie

Exactly one thing elevates this telepic above its movie-of-the-week brethren, and that's the performance of Sela Ward as drugged-out '80s news anchor Jessica Savitch. Although she invests her role with a ferocity rarely found in such by-the-numbers biopics, Ward also resists the urge to chew scenery. It's a delicate juggling act -- one unfortunately not matched by Linda Bergman's script. In adapting Gwenda Blair's book Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News, Bergman jettisons the source material's focus on the history and politics of network journalism. The result is a script that hits all of the expected notes, compressing events into familiar arcs and treating the TV news business like any other showbiz milieu. It's probably too much to expect a standard-issue TV movie to break the mold, but it's interesting to ponder what a cable network might have done with the same material.