Is The Documentary Dying?

Glance at the list of top contenders for the nonfiction special this Emmy season and you’ll find some big musical talent: Bruce Springsteen. Celine Dion. John Williams. The Beatles.

Yet far from a thrilling foray into the modern canon, these Rock and Roll Hall of Fame excursions suggest a world in which nonfiction TV has become an exercise in brand management, say documentary leaders, marginalizing robust storytelling and journalism.

The Emmys documentary special once covered a wide range of social topics. Beginning some 25 years ago, it included the stories of Vietnam POWs and prison cover-ups, child beauty-pageant contestants and racial inequities. But in recent years this has morphed. In 2024, four of the five nominees were authorized celebrity biographies. The year before? The same.

Don’t count on much changing this season: Artist-friendly music docs flood the space.

“A lot of this is the shift to streaming where companies are looking for names that are reliable and global, and what’s being said in the films doesn’t really matter,” says Thom Powers, a veteran documentary programmer at Toronto, DOC NYC and other festivals. “It becomes less about content or rigor and more about marketing.”

That these shifts are happening at a time of crisis — from social injustice to climate disasters to the slashing of the federal safety net — makes the tragedy that much greater, say nonfiction experts. Documentaries are unavailable at the exact moment they’re needed most.

Three veteran filmmakers, who all asked not to be identified because they did not want to jeopardize even hypothetical partnerships, expressed their concern and pointed to the shift in the doc power base from onetime rulers PBS and HBO to Netflix, Disney and Apple, which they say prioritize polish and name recognition.

Some of the diminishment, they say, can also be traced to when streamers began running commercials, as Netflix did in late 2022, giving them a weaker stomach for content that might alienate advertisers.

What’s more, these platforms sometimes pay their subjects, turning them into de facto directors. After so many decades when artists, actors and athletes were forced to cede control to the companies, record labels and teams they work for, the pendulum has swung the other way.

Not that the companies don’t have their say: A film’s need for music rights and the increasingly tight oversight by the entities that control them can mean even basic humanizing details are left out. Many nonfiction films these days are about only what the subject wants us to see — less documentaries than documercials.

The crisis came to the fore in the fall with the revelation that Ezra Edelman, the creative force behind the Emmy-winning 2016 docuseries O.J.: Made in America, had directed a similarly ambitious piece for Netflix about the beautiful genius and alleged malevolent manipulations (and worse) of Prince. But with both the lawyers and rights-management company Primary Wave that were in charge of the musician’s estate worried about the effects on Prince’s catalog sales, at least some among the estate overseers reportedly threatened to use a clause in the contract that would require the nine-hour film to be cut down to six. The move led to the completed piece being permanently shelved. A new, more burnished authorized movie not directed by Edelman will now rise in its place.

One hardly needs a nine-hour plumbing of the dark soul of Paisley Park to understand what’s being lost. Time and again, the artist-approved film glides past the meatiest material. Of the Springsteen-centric Road Diary, The Hollywood Reporter’s review offered that “an in-depth excavation or an exhaustive accounting, this is not.” Of Music by John Williams, The Guardian said, “The man behind the maestro remains elusive.” Of I Am: Celine Dion, Variety noted that the movie was “managed to within an inch of its life … there’s a sense the filmmaker didn’t want to include anything her subject wouldn’t approve of.”

The shift is surprisingly recent. Just six years ago, the winner of the Emmy for doc special was Leaving Neverland, HBO’s unflinching look at alleged Michael Jackson abuses from two alleged victims — a far cry from last year’s winner about the genius of Jim Henson that was authorized by his family and came out from Disney. The company was doubtless happy not to deal with Neverland-level legal headaches. (There does still seem to be journalism within certain narrow documentary genres, like true-crime, which recently yielded Liz Garbus’ robust Netflix docuseries Gone Girls.)

Doc-world veterans point to the size of the streamers as a culprit.

“It’s a difficult environment now in the United States for controversial content,” says Alex Gibney, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker (Going Clear won the nonfiction special Emmy in 2015). “With consolidation comes a belief that you can talk to everybody, so you don’t want to offend anybody.”

Gibney’s own journalistic film about Benjamin Netanyahu, The Bibi Files, couldn’t find a major network or streamer at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, joining another acclaimed TIFF work, Steve Pink’s anti-Trump doc The Last Republican, in the distribution desert. Instead, filmmakers say the documentaries that land big deals are well-meaning but ultimately unrigorous — fan worship in auteurist clothing.

Serving fans is hardly a crime, of course, and many of the music films can charm or educate the faithful. But filmmakers say they worry that these soft-focus looks are crowding out serious work. And they ruefully register the irony that artists whose genius came from exploring messy contradictions often wind up with treatments largely free of them.

The music industry personalities behind these movies maintain that their efforts serve creativity in their own way, and that while they may have a measured hand in how they handle sensitive or controversial material, they still aim to cast an illuminating light.

“The artists have to be willing to tell their story, and that means the good and the bad, the wins and the struggles,” says Tom Mackay, president of premium content at Sony Music Entertainment, which has been behind a host of recent music docs, including films on Cyndi Lauper, June Carter Cash, Luther Vandross and this year’s Celine Dion picture. “It can’t be a two-hour victory lap.”

Mackay acknowledges that a built-in audience is part of the appeal in a difficult media environment. Distributors can count on “that global fan base to migrate to that platform to watch that film,” he says.

While the presence of these movies is held up as an example of journalism marginalization, those involved with them say they’re actually responding to a deterioration in reporting culture and partly even addressing it. “Journalism — especially music journalism — has changed; there aren’t as many music outlets and not nearly as many in-depth articles about musicians as there used to be,” says Deborah Klein, a manager at Primary Wave whose clients include Melissa Etheridge and Cypress Hill, both of whom have been the subjects of recent docs. “This is a way to get to know them a little better.”

Still, many of the projects are driven by business models. Conglomerates with music catalogs don’t need to pay licensing fees, eliminating a main budgetary expense. They then get paid when they sell their movie to a platform and grab another bite at the revenue apple when the ensuing popularity leads to increased streams or album sales — a triumph less of cinema than synergy. It is difficult to avoid the monetizing truth that Disney+ is the company putting out the story of Star Wars composer John Williams or that NBC streaming arm Peacock is behind Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music.

A “universe” logic abides: Just as Disney produces Marvel and Star Wars shows by the bucket, it’s following the template in nonfiction, peddling three movies to which it owns the rights, Michael Lindsay-Hogg original 1970 Let It Be, Peter Jackson’s four-hour 2021 restoration of the footage from that film The Beatles: Get Back, and, now, the Scorsese-produced Beatles ’64. Any company worth its salt engages in cross-promotion. But producing and distributing films with a commoditized-package strategy for a band that spent much of its career fighting commoditized packaging can set off the irony meter. Welcome to the Lennonverse.

Natalia Nastaskin, chief content officer of Primary Wave, says that while “we do hope that there’s impact on catalog,” she also believes “there’s an opportunity for revelatory storytelling” with these movies. She called them “another form of artistic expression.”

But documentary directors say the approach makes for a very different environment than the one they’re used to. “Getting called into a meeting on these projects, you can sometimes feel more like you’re filling a marketing hole than offering an artistic vision,” says one.

Sheila Nevins, the former HBO executive and so-called “godmother” of the modern documentary who has been nominated for the Emmy nonfiction special some 30 times, says she has been disheartened by the business and creative tilt in the past several years. “The documentary is in hiding,” she says flatly.

Still, she believes that even if the biggest streamers don’t take many risks, a groundswell of documentarians as well as audiences eager to understand the challenges facing the country will emerge to resurrect the form.

“Just because these companies don’t want to go too deep into the water doesn’t mean docs are coming to an end,” Nevins notes, suggesting the possibility of private investment to produce and distribute films. “These filmmakers will come back with their fists on fire. And they’re going to punch very hard.”

This story first appeared in a May stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.