Scoop is a dramatized fictional retelling of the insider account of how the women of Newsnight secured Prince Andrew’s infamous interview. The film is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Sam McAlister, a booker working at the BBC, for its Newsnight program, gets the scoop of all time when she sniffs something bigger cooking behind the recent controversy regarding Prince Andrew’s relations with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
She works hard to get his private security to convince him and give an interview. He meets with her and the host of Newsnight, who has initially a tense dynamic with Sam.
The women at Newsnight work together and move past their dynamics to get an all-time scoop and interview before anyone else can. When Epstein is arrested, all hell breaks loose and Sam moves fast to secure the interview.
Prince Andrew eventually agrees to the interview which quickly becomes infamous and is lambasted all across the globe in the online sphere and mainstream media.
He’s panned and also faces allegations of sexual abuse, which he denies in the interview. Later on, he witnesses the flurry of negative responses to his interview which he thought went quite well.
Meanwhile, Sam’s work is recognized and appreciated, as she finally takes a breather, relieved that her work actually matters unlike what she feared at first.
Ending explained:
Securing the interview
Sam McAlister is an exceptional booker for BBC and smells something cooking when others don’t, at least to the extent that she does.
She reaches out to Jae Donnelly, the pap who clicked the photo of Prince Andrew on a walk in the park with Jeffrey Epstein years ago.
He is the one who later tells her about the imminent arrest of the billionaire sex offender.
That’s when Sam decides to rush to Amanda Thirsk, the private secretary of Prince Andrew who had initially reached out to McAlister for an image-laundering interview.
The urgency is real, and Amanda soon arranges a meeting with Prince Andrew and a team from BBC’s Newsnight.
Sam accompanies Newsnight host Emily Maitlis and producer Stewart to meet the Duke of York at the palace, where Sam puts the reality of the discourse regarding him rather bluntly.
Soon, they hear that they have a green light for the interview. The team prepares the questions and the strategy during the interview.
The interview
The date arrives and the interview commences.
Emily does a great job pressuring and steering the interview in a direction where Prince Andrew, though deluded he’s doing fine, only digs himself a deeper hole by the moment.
He says quite a lot of weird, problematic, and embarrassing things in addition to obvious lies.
Despite Emily pressing him time and again to admit to his mistake and apologize to the victim(s), he doesn’t and categorically denies the allegations.
The aftermath
After the interview, he and his staff are confident and pleased with how Prince Andrew handled it all, as is he. However, the reactions online and everywhere else are anything but pleasant, understandably so.
He eventually sees all the reactions and responses to his disastrous interview, which becomes Newsnight’s most viewed segment. He later steps back from his royal duties and is soon stripped of his royal titles.
He settles with Virginia Giuffre for 12 million pounds.
Sam McAlister, who finds new confidence in her work and her camaraderie with her colleagues gets better, goes on to leave BBC in 2021 and becomes a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, teaching negotiation.
Also Read: Crooks (2024) summary and ending explained
