The biggest thing on Broadway isn’t some showstopping musical, and it isn’t Stranger Things. It’s a straight play about the history of television news. Granted, it happens to star George Clooney, and there are a few jazzy interludes to boot.

But even so, the success of Good Night, and Good Luck has been nothing short of astonishing. With only a few performances left—Sunday’s matinee, hours before the Tonys, where it’s up for five awards, will be the last—the play is still breaking records, racking up an unprecedented $4.2 million in box-office grosses in a single week. Movie-star productions have driven ticket prices to record heights this season, with the best seats at the Denzel Washington–Jake Gyllenhaal Othello going for nearly $1,000.

(Before that production opened in March, the previous weekly record, set by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, was $2.7 million.) But Good Night doesn’t promise the pyrotechnics of Denzel doing Shakespeare, or even Kieran Culkin doing David Mamet. It’s a sobersided examination of journalistic ethics, a literal morality play that begins and ends with its stern-faced hero, the legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, facing the audience behind a lectern.

And week after week, it’s filling the cavernous Winter Garden Theatre, once home to Cats, with thundering applause. Like Wicked or Sunset Blvd., Good Night, and Good Luck (the comma, meant to denote a pause in Murrow’s habitual sign-off, is regrettably mandatory) is derived from a preestablished property. But the 2005 movie on which it’s based was no blockbuster, and although it was nominated for six Academy Awards, it walked away with none.

It’s clear why Clooney, who directed the movie and co-wrote the screenplay with his longtime creative partner Grant Heslov, thought the time was right to reiterate its message about the importance of a courageous and uncompromising press, especially when it comes to defusing the lies of right-wing ideologues. It was less clear that a movie so focused on the power of the filmed image would translate to the stage, or that resistance-fatigued audiences would turn out in such numbers, or at such a cost. (The cheapest unobstructed ticket I could find to the Wednesday matinee I saw last week was just under $300.)

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Although the Broadway version hews close to the movie’s structure, focusing on Murrow’s televisual battles with red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and bookended by excerpts from his 1958 speech to a news directors convention, director David Cromer has turned it into a bona fide theatrical spectacle, with a cast of nearly two dozen, a jazz combo perched on a platform that hovers above the stage, and an auditorium strewn with monitors brought to life by Murrow’s CBS broadcasts. But it’s safe to say that’s not what’s bringing audiences in. It’s Clooney, and the promise of spending 100 minutes in a crowd of people who share your concerns about the state of the world, people who nod in the same places, applaud the same lines—a crowd that might, as on the afternoon I saw it, find you a few feet away from Anderson Cooper or even, as it had the night before, Barack and Michelle Obama.

Advertisement Even at capacity, the Winter Garden can fit only 1,500 a night, and the play’s short run further limits its reach. But Clooney and co. have come up with a solution that will bring Good Night, and Good Luck to a much larger audience and also return it to its original source. On Saturday at 7 p.m. Eastern, the play’s penultimate performance will be broadcast live on CNN and stream simultaneously on Max and CNN’s website.

(No subscription is required for the latter.) Although Broadway plays have been livestreamed since the mid-2010s, it’s the first time one has been broadcast on television, and it harks back to an era when most TV was live and every broadcast was a high-wire act. Advertisement In what became known as the “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech, Murrow often refers to television as an “instrument,” a tool of immense power but no fixed purpose.

It can be used to inform or entertain, to enlighten or mislead. But even after going toe-to-toe with McCarthy, who used vague and unsupported charges of communist infiltration to build his own power and wreck untold numbers of lives, his concern was less with bad information than with the lack of it. Clooney and Heslov use only a small portion of Murrow’s full remarks, but in their excerpts, which Clooney delivers against a background of utter blackness, one word and its variants stand out in particular, and that word is insulate.

If “this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse, and insulate,” Clooney-as-Murrow warns, “then the tube is flickering now, and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.” Advertisement Advertisement Although the play, unlike the movie, is performed in color, it still tends to paint that struggle in black and white. When Murrow steps away from his news program See It Now to host Person to Person, which used then-novel remote technology to interview celebrities in their homes from the CBS studios in Manhattan, we’re meant to see it as an intolerable stain on his gravitas. As soon as he finishes talking to Liberace—who, like other historical figures in the play, is represented by footage taken from the actual broadcast rather than being played by the actor—Clooney’s Murrow holds his pained smile for a beat, then drops into an emphatic scowl, drawing a knowing chuckle from the crowd.

Person to Person also featured notable subjects like John Steinbeck, Leonard Bernstein, and Harry Truman, but that wouldn’t serve the stark dichotomy between informing and entertaining that Clooney and Heslov seem determined to present. When, later in the play, a screen flashes images from I Love Lucy, it’s not to pay tribute to a TV landmark but to frame it as a frivolous distraction. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In his speech, Murrow fantasizes about a world in which prime-time variety shows are replaced on occasion by informative news broadcasts, and the television landscape of the 1950s was much closer to a zero-sum game: There were only so many networks and hours in the broadcast day, so news programs necessarily took space away from more profitable forms of programming.

But it’s a strange passage to highlight now, especially when so many of Murrow’s remarks ring out with undiminished power nearly 60 years after the fact. The statement “One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising, and news” is at least as true in 2025 as it was in 1958. Advertisement Related From Slate George Clooney Is a Great Actor.

Why Is He Such a Boring Director? Read More Onstage, Good Night, and Good Luck is less insistent on its own seriousness than it was on film, a little more willing to indulge in showmanship for the sake of putting butts in seats. Clooney is an activist and philanthropist who has put millions of his own dollars toward charitable causes, but he’s also a ham, and in front of a paying crowd, he’s at pains to entirely suppress that side of himself.

His Murrow lacks the flinty authority of David Strathairn’s film version, the weariness of a righteous man worn down by the iniquities of the world, but he’s got the heart of a striver, the determination of a boss whom people stay late for without being asked, then stays later himself. Advertisement Advertisement What Good Night, and Good Luck misses, paradoxically, is that Murrow was a skilled performer in his own right—not an entertainer, but someone who knew how to convey moral seriousness on camera and use the limitations of his fledgling medium to his advantage. Watch the real See It Now report on Joe McCarthy and you can see how he uses his eyes to cue the cut from his straight-to-camera remarks to file footage of the senator, using McCarthy’s own words to underline his history of contradictory and nonsensical claims.

(Half a century later, Jon Stewart would make his name with an intensified version of the same technique.) At one point, Murrow answers McCarthy’s charge about bias in the “left-wing press” by paging through a stack of newspapers, reading their coverage aloud as the camera peers over his shoulder. Half the screen is filled with his back, but on the other, we can see the headlines flash by as he pulls one centrist paper after another off the anti-McCarthy pile, an ingeniously simple way of simulating a montage without the need for a single cut.

Advertisement Advertisement As the title of See It Now indicates, Murrow and his CBS cohort, including producer Fred W. Friendly (Glenn Fleshler) and future 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt (Will Dagger), understood that the power of television was in showing audience members the truth, not just speaking it at them. There’s a way in which Good Night, and Good Luck simply serves as a Trojan horse for getting contemporary audiences to watch the generous amounts of historical footage the production contains, not just of McCarthy but of the people he accused, including Annie Lee Moss, a middle-aged widow he claimed was a Soviet spy, and those caught up in the climate of fear he inflamed, like Reserve Lt. Milo Radulovich, who was expelled from the Air Force because of alleged Communist ties within his family, based on evidence that neither he nor his lawyer was allowed to see. When Friendly points out to Murrow that Radulovich’s case isn’t directly related to McCarthy’s witch hunt, Murrow responds, “Isn’t it?” (Moss was eventually cleared of the charges, and Radulovich was reinstated after the See It Now report aired.)

Watching McCarthy in the present, you can see how skilled he was at whipping up hysteria and dodging direct questions, and why television, including Murrow’s report and the nationally broadcast Army–McCarthy hearings, ultimately proved his downfall. In the See It Now footage, he repeatedly pauses speeches to laugh at his own jokes, a wheezy, nervous chuckle that would have been an instant career killer in a more media-defined era. It helped that Murrow had the truth on his side, but the contest might have gone to him either way.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Where the movie version of Good Night, and Good Luck can simply fill the screen with archival footage, the stage production directs the audience’s attention to a variety of frames, within the proscenium and without. Radulovich is first seen projected in the back of a news meeting, and other screens eventually make their way onto the stage, growing larger until they dwarf the figures in front of them. As Murrow sits to narrate his live introduction to one See It Now, a bulky camera glides squarely between him and the audience members, blocking their view of the star they’ve paid to witness in the flesh, although the broadcast continues all around them.

They can see Clooney, like the historical figures with whose images he shares the stage, only on television. During my performance, a cellphone rang out during Clooney’s climatic speech, throwing him off his game enough that he bobbled his lines. He tilted his head forward and twisted his mouth into a smile, a gesture familiar from as far back as his ER days.

For a moment, we were in the presence of the movie star himself. And then he was gone. Advertisement Advertisement Clooney and Heslov originally planned to end their movie with a montage of TV’s greatest hits, demonstrating the medium’s influence from Murrow’s era to the present.

They ditched the idea, but it’s resurfaced in the stage version. The collage of clips, ranging from 9/11 to The Jerry Springer Show, seems designed to underline Murrow’s point that television can be used for good or for ill, and the choice of which possibility to embrace lies, in the end, with us. But so does the responsibility, and the consequences, of choosing poorly.

Murrow’s story isn’t one of unmitigated triumph—although the play doesn’t reveal the fact, the pugnacious tone of the 1958 speech was undoubtedly informed by See It Now’s cancellation three months before. And CBS itself has most recently made news for offering Donald Trump a $15 million settlement in his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, reportedly a condition of allowing a multibillion-dollar merger involving its corporate parent. As for CNN, the network is touting its groundbreaking Broadway simulcast the same week it reportedly fired its chief national security correspondent after one of his reports cost the network $5 million in a defamation case.

The pressures that deformed the news in Murrow’s day have only grown more intense, and its defenses weaker. The last line of protection is those people sitting in the dark, watching George Clooney remind them what they have to do.