Before the Fall

As ALC’s premier on-air personality, Cunningham’s most valuable skill is a keen understanding of his audience and their grievances. Plucked from obscurity by David Bateman to host a new kind of news show, Cunningham’s blend of working-class persona and anger at educated elites who, he claims, are destroying the country strikes a raw nerve with mostly working-class, white men. Cunningham can read the writing on the wall—demographics in the United States are changing, the country’s industrial might is a thing of the past, and jobs are shipped overseas. In the face of these radical changes, Cunningham finds his audience, white men who feel they are being pushed aside by a shadowy global elite. Whether Cunningham truly believes his own rhetoric or he’s simply found a convenient target to boost his ratings is unclear—the “fire-breathing malcontent” has become his “brand” (165)—but his wealth has certainly elevated him above the working-class status he so proudly claims.

Cunningham’s position at the top of the ratings has made him, in his mind, immune to consequences. The legal guardrails of traditional journalism don’t apply to him, he believes, and anything is fair game in pursuit of a story, including tapping phones and hacking emails. David has been the only check on his reckless abuse of power, and with David gone, he runs wild, not only recording private phone conversations but playing them on the air. Cunningham is a cautionary tale. TV hosts have only the power that viewers give them, and the public appetite for scandal feeds the media beast until it runs amok, trampling individual rights in the process.

As a veteran of the scrum of political campaigns and, later, as head of ALC News, David brings an aggressive innovation to broadcast news. He argues that “making” the news rather than reporting it after the fact is an exciting new business model. Given the green light, he hires Bill Cunningham as its first on-air personality. Although Cunningham breaks all the rules of standard journalism, his show is a hit, and David’s radical experiment bears fruit. His success is a double-edged sword, however. His job consumes him, and although his family lives in luxury, they rarely see him. David constantly juggles those priorities, but work usually wins out. Still, David is not an uncaring workaholic. He loves his family and does wish to spend more time with them, but the demands of his job are very real and the stakes are high. In fact, David relishes his responsibilities, his ego stroked by the high-profile world he helps to shape. He is the alpha male, running on the adrenaline of breaking news and managing crises.

A former preschool teacher, Maggie stumbles into wealth when she marries David Bateman. She has, by some measure, won the lottery, freed from work and the insecurities of living paycheck to paycheck. However, Maggie never becomes comfortable with her upper-class status. She feels the constant need to apologize for it. She can’t even boast the pride of having earned it. She compensates for these feelings by devoting her life to her children, simplifying their existence, and to supporting charitable causes. Part of that altruistic instinct includes befriending a local artist, Scott, and showing interest in his work. In fact, Maggie’s relationship with Scott—purely platonic, although she finds his bohemian lifestyle and roguish good looks an attractive alternative to her current, privileged life—becomes cause for scandalous speculation. Maggie is the bored, rich housewife, but her discomfort with her nouveau riche existence and her dedication to paying it forward give her a sympathetic layer.

NTSB investigator Gus Franklin, an engineer schooled in logic and dispassion, has learned over the years the human cost of tragedy. His job requires a certain emotional distance, but a divorce and close proximity to death have shrunk that distance considerably. He is often the only member of the investigative team to consider Scott’s trauma or his privacy during questioning. He frequently prefaces his questions with an apology and makes sure to inquire about Scott and JJ’s welfare. Ultimately, however, the cause of the crash is his main concern, and he never loses his engineer’s eye for detail as he is able to construct a narrative of the flight’s final moments from a sheared wing, a black box data recorder, and a first-person account.

Flight attendant Emma Lightner is both blessed and cursed by her physical beauty. While it’s certainly a factor in her employment with GullWing Airlines, it’s also the cause of Charlie Busch’s attraction and ultimate obsession. Emma’s backstory—her father, an Air Force pilot, introduces her to flying, and she has a background in finance—is important because, as a flight attendant, she is often viewed simply as a pretty face, someone to serve cocktails. The advantages of GullWing—their passenger list often boasts the rich and famous—are also a disadvantage. The privileged class she serves sometimes sees her as an object for their amusement. In fact, the disadvantages of the job are beginning to outweigh the advantages, and Emma grows restless, pondering her next career move. Until then, however, she remains the consummate professional, even in the face of an abusive stalker.