The first few episodes of Notorious showed Louise Herrick, host of Louise Herrick Live, as a narcissistic, boozy workaholic who moves between men as fast as she moves between news segments. That’s all well and good — every workplace-related show needs one of these — but I’m happy to say that viewers got a look at Louise Herrick's backstory on Notorious. I’m glad how many layers there are to peel back on this news powerhouse.
While Julia is running around trying to make the Trinity rape case happen and figure out what exactly happened to Sarah Keaton, a story pops up about an American POW that was recently beheaded by insurgents — no one knew of his whereabouts, but one of the staff at Louise Herrick Live has video from a source of the man being killed. Julia says they’ll run it if they have no other leads, and Louise stops her, saying they’re not doing the story. Well, when they don’t have anything else to fill one of Louise’s shows, Julia airs the beheading footage, and Louise isn’t happy. In eight years, she says, she has never asked Julia not to air something — until now — and Julia did it anyway. Then Louise explains that when she was in Afghanistan working as a journalist, she fell in love with a man who was eventually captured and beheaded in the same manner as the American POW. She told Julia that she didn’t need to picture him pleading for his life, and she didn’t need to be reminded of it with a story like the one they just showed. Since his death, Louise said, she has lived life to the fullest and with the least amount of emotion, because what’s the point? There’s no luck. Only life, and then you die.
Louise’s backstory certainly took a dark turn, didn’t it? And thank you, Notorious writers, for that. I’m all for the louse character on television, but there’s no way that Louise Herrick would be hosting the most popular cable news show on television if she weren’t good at her job. She had to have seen some things in order to get to the top, and I think there’s definitely more where that came from on Notorious.
Images: Eli Joshua Ade/ABC (2)
