Charlie Rose Interviews Charlie Rose

So You Want to Watch the Self-Interview

The 2017 special where Charlie Rose interviews himself wasn't produced like a normal documentary. It came out of nowhere, aired on PBS, and then vanished within a week when the sexual harassment allegations broke. If you've been searching for it, you already know the download situation is a mess. I've spent more hours than I care to admit tracking down clean copies over the years, usually because someone asked me to recommend it for a film school class or a media studies discussion group. Here's what actually works. The show runs about 43 minutes. Rose sits at his signature glass desk in what looks like his office, asking himself questions about his life, his work ethic, his family relationships, and his approach to journalism. He plays both roles — the interviewer and the subject — switching seamlessly between them. The camera cuts between a medium shot of him as "Rose the interviewer" and a tighter shot as "Rose the interviewee." There's no B-roll footage, no archival clips, no musical interludes. Just a man talking to himself in a room. What makes this actually worth watching, beyond the obvious novelty factor, is that Rose drops the polished broadcast persona. The guy who used to steer Bill Clinton and every major world leader through his interviews is sitting there admitting he worked 100-hour weeks, that his children barely spoke to him, and that he didn't understand why until it was too late. The performance part is watching someone construct a narrative about himself in real time, which is both fascinating and uncomfortable.

The structure is deliberate. He starts with professional autobiography — how he got into broadcasting, what he valued about the craft — then moves into personal territory. By the halfway mark he's discussing his divorce and estrangement from his kids. The final segment is almost entirely about regret. It's not subtle. It's not a balanced portrait. It's a man who knew the camera would be off after this and apparently wanted to say whatever he wanted on the record.

Where to Actually Find It

The official PBS broadcast was pulled after the allegations surfaced in September 2017. No remaster exists. The original transmission is the best source anyone has, and it's been archived by a number of public domain and private repositories. Here's the realistic picture: PBS's own servers no longer host it. The page that used to carry the full episode returns a 404 or an edit notice now. If you find a link claiming to be from pbs.org, it's either a cached mirror or it's broken. The most reliable current source is the Internet Archive. A complete 720p encode of the original PBS feed exists there under the collection name "Charlie Rose Interviews Charlie Rose." The quality is broadcast-standard — not great, not terrible. Audio is clean mono, video has the usual PBS compression artifacts from that era. Downloading from archive.org works if you use their native downloader or a browser extension. The file is roughly 600MB, which makes it manageable for most setups.

YouTube still has user uploads, mostly ripped from the archive.org source or from cable-delayed network captures. Quality varies wildly. Some are 480p with watermarks, some are decent 720p rips. The problem with YouTube is that the platform actively takedowns this content occasionally because of rights management discussions around the Rose estate. A link that works today might be dead tomorrow. I ran into a specific problem last winter when a grad student needed a timestamped reference for a paper on self-reflexive documentary form. The archive.org copy had a slight audio dropout at the 22:14 mark where Rose transitions from discussing his early career to the personal section. I tried several other sources — a Vimeo upload, a direct YouTube rip, and a torrent — and they all had the same dropout. That gap appears to be baked into the original PBS master, likely from a tape edit. The workaround was actually going to the Wayback Machine and pulling the live stream cache from September 2017, which preserved the full audio track. It was the only version without that gap. If you're working from this for academic purposes, verify your source against the archive.org entry ID and note the discrepancy if your copy has the dropout.

What Beginners Miss About This Special

Most people treat this as a curiosity piece. The thing that makes it genuinely useful for media analysis is how it reveals the mechanics of Rose's interview style — not as a technique, but as a performance architecture. Watch how he positions himself as the interviewer: leaning forward slightly, pen in hand, notebook open even though he's reading from prepared questions. These are the same physical tells he used with actual guests. Then watch him switch to the interviewee role: back in the chair, hands folded, the posture of someone being examined rather than doing the examining. He's literally externalizing the power dynamic of every interview he ever conducted, putting both sides of the equation in one body. There's also a technical detail that's easy to overlook. The two-camera setup isn't symmetric. The "interviewer" angle is a wider frame that shows more of the desk and the background set. The "subject" angle is tighter and slightly higher, which subtly flatters the person on screen. Rose chose these framing differences consciously, even though he was also the director in this scenario. It means the visual language of his own show was preserved intact — he didn't break the grammar of his broadcast format even while dismantling its premise. Another counter-intuitive point: this isn't actually a new format for Rose. He'd been doing variations of this self-reflection in his memoir and in behind-the-scenes commentary for years. What changed was the degree of candor. The interviews with real subjects always had an unspoken contract where both parties maintained a certain distance. Removing the other person from the equation removed that constraint entirely, and Rose filled the silence with things he'd clearly been holding back.

Limitations and Why This Isn't for Everyone

The biggest issue is that watching this now carries unavoidable context that the September 2017 audience didn't have. Every moment where Rose is talking about personal relationships, workplace dynamics, or accountability is filtered through what we know about the allegations that followed. Some viewers find this makes certain segments feel deeply uncomfortable or even ironic rather than reflective. That's a legitimate reaction, not something to push past. The second limitation is structural. This is a single conversation without fact-checking, without counterpoint, without anyone asking Rose the hard questions he was avoiding by asking them himself. It's introspection, not accountability. If you're looking for a reckoning, this isn't it. It's a confession filmed during a window where the reckoning hadn't caught up yet. If you want something similar in tone but with actual external perspective, the 2016 episode of his show featuring a retrospective on his career does a better job of balancing self-praise with genuine humility, largely because other people were in the room pushing back. Rose at his most interesting was always in dialectic — argument, tension, the push-and-pull of a real conversation. This special strips all that away, which is exactly why it's valuable and exactly why it feels hollow on rewatch.