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"I know what people are gonna say about me,” Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe) deadpans in the opening voice-over of The Loudest Voice, the new Showtime miniseries about how he created Fox News. “I can pretty much pick the words for you: Right-wing. Paranoid. Fat.”

It’s a wisecrack the real Ailes made to reporters, documented by journalist Gabriel Sherman in his 2014 Ailes biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room, the miniseries’ source material. And it’s a fairly accurate representation of Ailes’s titanic media persona—though, by the time of his death a few years later, “predator” would’ve also made that short list of descriptors. Ailes first rose to prominence as a television producer and Republican strategist in the 1960s, then wedged himself firmly into a new echelon of power after creating the Fox News network for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in the 1990s. But his final year was a scandal tsunami. He was sued for sexual harassment by high-profile former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson in 2016 and subsequently ousted as CEO of Fox after additional testimony of abuse surfaced. He died in 2017.

The Loudest Voice opens with Ailes’s death, but quickly backs up to the beginning of his career at Fox News, using the second half of Sherman’s book as its narrative backbone. Both before and after Ailes’s downfall, Sherman was the infotainment maestro’s most dogged chronicler, and the miniseries isn’t a conventional biopic so much as it is a series of linked snapshots about how Ailes built Fox News and damaged the people around him. In the pilot episode, the spectrum of Ailes’s personality is on display, from his insult-comic charm and occasional genuine warmth for his coworkers to his hideous, mile-wide abusive streak.

Sherman, who cowrote three episodes of the miniseries, has now traced Ailes’s rise in two very different formats. The Showtime series is his first screenwriting gig, but it’s an outgrowth of a longtime fixation on capturing the excesses and successes of New York’s biggest egos. Sherman started his career right out of college at a pre–Jared Kushner New York Observer, working the real estate beat—which meant he got a taste for writing about power plays from megalomaniacs early on. “I feel like I’ve been thinking about covering Trump since I was a cub reporter,” Sherman said. After briefly working for Condé Nast’s short-lived Portfolio magazine, he wrote a number of cover stories for New York magazine, including a juicy dissection of a social media scandal that roiled the fancy New York private school Horace Mann, before joining the staff in 2008. John Homans, Sherman’s current editor at Vanity Fair, is the one who hired him for New York magazine, impressed by the young reporter’s relentlessness at tracking down sources. “He was this incredibly aggressive and amazing phone-caller,” Homans said. “He has that mixture of competitiveness and anxiety that someone is going to get past him. It motivated him to really be one of the reporters of his generation.”

[Read more from Kate Knibbs's piece the writer of The Loudest Voice in the Room, which the new Showtime miniseries is based on.]