ORIGINAL
IN 2024, YOU’RE NOT A TRUE STAR UNLESS THERE IS A HIT DOCUMENTARY SERIES DEVOTED TO YOU ON A PRESTIGE STREAMER. AND, IF YOU CAN SWING IT, WHY NOT DEMAND FINAL CUT — AND A SHARE OF THE PROFITS ? ESQUIRE ASKS: WHAT HAPPENED TO EDITORIAL INTEGRIT Y? AND HOW COME WE CAN’T STOP WATCHING?
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It’s always the same come-on. We’re invited into their lounge, or maybe their bedroom. The vibe is casual, intimate: undone hair, no make-up and lots of eye contact. Then at some point, usually within the first 10 minutes, this fascinating creature will lean in close and, in a whisper, confide. Something like, “I am trying to sort out the wreckage of the past.” (Robbie Williams, 2023.) Or: “Let me make you a promise: I’ll only tell you my darkest secrets.” (Selena Gomez, 2022.) Or: “As reliable as the rhythmic beating of my own heart is my need to talk to you.” (Bruce Springsteen, 2020.) And, from that point on, it’s done: you’re lost in the celebrity-documentary vortex.
It was in the spring of 2020 that I first realised I’d been sucked in. I’d become increasingly reliant on 1990s basketball analogies to communicate my every emotional state. Luckily, most of my nearest and dearest were also among the 23.8 million who’d recently binge-watched Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance docuseries on Netflix. So, as with the Chicago Bulls’ Big 3 line-up during the crucial 1993 Game 6 play-off against the Phoenix Suns, there was intuitive understanding.
Once upon a time, documentaries were admired as an oasis of integrity in showbiz’s ethical desert. In every other sector of film and television, star-power rules supreme, but the documentarian remained unbiddable and incorruptible, pointing their camera towards the human stories that really matter — war, climate change, injustice, art. On the rare occasion celebrity was a subject for documentary, it was treated with scepticism, as in Geri, Molly Dineen’s 1999 study of the former Spice Girl, in which the Bafta-winning film-maker can be heard sharply correcting Halliwell’s mistaken belief that she would have “complete control and it will be edited if there’s anything bad”. As if ! Even after 2004, when Michael Moore’s Iraq War doc Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or, broke box-office records and ushered in the Golden Age of documentaries, the pay remained stubbornly low and the journalistic standards resolutely high.
Cut forward only a few years, however, and documentary is as enamoured with celebrity as the mo
