The Hack ★★★½This seven-part series, which tells the story of perhaps the biggest media scandal of the century, is eminently watchable and mostly compelling, but it suffers from a serious case of split personality that ultimately makes it a little hard to buy into. David Tennant breaks the fourth wall in The Hack. Credit: StanIf you watched just the first episode in isolation, you’d say this was an arch telling of the investigation by Nick Davies (David Tennant), a freelance investigative journalist working for The Guardian, into the way Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World employed private investigators to illegally hack the phones of thousands of people in the UK – celebrities, sports stars, politicians and regular folk – to generate scoops. There are lots of jokes, fanciful sequences, raised eyebrows, and breaking of the fourth wall – all of which suggests that perhaps writer Jack Thorne (Adolescence) and director Lewis Arnold (the Yorkshire Ripper series The Long Shadow) didn’t quite trust that the audience would be able to follow the admittedly complex plot without the help of some big cues.