A radio reporter, a sound technician, and a frontline that exists only in their microphones: Special Correspondents is a 2016 comedy written and directed by Ricky Gervais.
What is Special Correspondents about?
The assignment looks straightforward on paper. An armed uprising in South America has become the story of the moment, and a New York radio station wants audio from the ground. Getting there is where everything comes apart. Rather than admit the trip never happened, the reporter and his technician take a room above a Spanish restaurant near the station and file dispatches about a conflict they are describing instead of witnessing. Each convincing broadcast raises the bar for the next, so the invented frontline acquires names, weather and danger by the hour. A small evasion grows into a national story, with listeners and colleagues waiting for updates the pair must keep inventing.
About the cast
The ensemble gathers Ricky Gervais, Eric Bana, Vera Farmiga, Kelly Macdonald, Benjamin Bratt, Raul Castillo, America Ferrera and Meghan Heffern. The blend is deliberate: performers known for dry comic timing share scenes with actors better associated with drama, and the picture works that contrast rather than reaching for broad gags. Gervais directs as well as appearing among the cast.
Context & significance
Special Correspondents is a Canadian and British production from 2016, and it sits inside a durable comic tradition: stories about reporting that has quietly drifted away from what actually occurred. Its subject is less the war than the machinery around it: a commercial radio operation where airtime pressure shapes which version of an event reaches listeners. Much of Gervais's work as a writer and director turns on characters who tell one manageable lie in public and then have to live inside it, and the premise here follows that shape closely. Critical reception was mixed. For viewers who enjoy media satire, it offers a compact, dialogue-driven take with a cast broader than the genre usually carries.
Watching Special Correspondents on Ktime
Special Correspondents streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so it suits households that switch between Farsi and English viewing. This page is free to read; playback requires a K-Time account, and signing in takes a moment. The service is built for Persian-speaking viewers abroad, and the title plays on phones, tablets, computers and supported televisions.