october12–25, 2020 | newyork 89the world of documentary filmmakingbut
also from a television landscape primedby
decades of reality TV.
The boom in true crime, forinstance,
stems largely from the influential documen-
tary film The Thin Blue Line (1988)andthe
docuseries The Staircase (2004).Butthose
works are also refined, more expensive,in-
depth iterations of shows likeUnsolved
Mysteries, The FBI Files, ForensicFiles,and
the entire oeuvre of Nancy Grace. Themany
culinary docuseries over the pastseveral
years, which show cooking in hagiographic
slow motion and treat food cultureasall-
serious ethnographies, are capitalizingona
long-established audience for reality food
TV, a genre big and multifaceted enoughto
fill its own cookery-competitionuniverse.
Examples like Deaf U, out this Octoberon
Netflix, are docuseries instantiationsof
shows from the large and lucrativeworldof
insular-subculture series, like KeepingUp
With the Kardashians, 19 Kids andCount-
ing, Duck Dynasty, and Toddlers&Tiaras,
and shows like Teen Mom, Jon &KatePlus
8, and Little People, Big World, aboutchal-
lenging, often unusual life experiences.Fol-
lowing the TLC and MTV formatforreality
shows, a docuseries like Tiger Kingtakes
charismatic people in abnormalcircum-
stances and turns their lives intoobjects of
subculture tourism. They invite viewersto
tour unfamiliar worlds, the innerlivesof
everyone from polygamists, to peoplewith
disabilities, to—Can you imagine?—people
who live in the South.
Anglo-American culture has yettomeet
something lowbrow that it didn’t finda way
to repackage as classy and valuable.(See
bawdy Renaissance plays, 19th-century
serial fiction, soap operas.) Andonthe
major networks or on cable channelslike
TLC and A&E, most reality showsaretrash.
This is hardly a secret—many areproudly
lowbrow, and they’re treated by viewersand
network buyers alike as disposable.Some
are junky, cheaply made series thatrunfor-
ever, but even for a show with sky-highpro-
duction values, like The Real Housewives,
they are unreservedly mucky intoneand
story. They come with the added voyeuristic
kick of being real. Or realish. Realenough
for that oomph of busybody pleasure.
There’s an important distinctionbetween
the way most reality shows are madeand
the foundational ethos of a docuseries.
Reality shows are cast, tested, poked,prod-
ded, often prewritten, and editedtoshape
stories that would not otherwisehave
existed. Docu series, for the mostpart, film
their subjects as they are. There’sstill
opportunity to mold the story thatappears
onscreen—by changing how itunfolds,
whose perspectives are prioritized,which
ex cerpts to use out of many hoursoffilmed
footage, whom to include andwhomto
leave out. Still, the aim of documentary
filmmaking is typically to approachthesub-
ject from a direction that’s entirelyinverted
from that of reality TV. Reality producers
start with a story and find subjectstofit;
docuseries producers start withsubjects
and wait to see what the story willbe.
That difference is key to the legitimizing
link between the two forms. By now,several
decades into their life on TV, there’s an
entrenched understanding that reality
shows are unbelievable and, in somecases,
ethically suspect. There have beenethical
questions about many docuseries,of course,
and true crime as a genre comeswithall
kinds of concerns about exploitingvictims
for entertainment. But those questionsare
different than the in-your-face uneaseofan
episode of, say, Below Deck, wherea partici-
pant who’s obviously in the throesof a medi-
cation crisis continues to be on-camerain
spite of their ongoing struggles. Docuseries,madewitha journalisticeyeandwiththe
(unintoxicated)consentof theirsubjects,are
sanitizedversionsof reality-showmessiness.
Ifdubiousethicshelpdefinereality TV’s
lowbrowtrashiness,theperceptionthat a
docuseriesislessmanipulativeandless
manufacturedhelpssecureitsmoredigni-
fiedstatus.Thatcomesacrossinthepackag-
ing,too.A serieslikeTheVowisbeautiful,an
artfulvisualexperiencethat turnsscratchy
phonerecordingsintotensescenesanda
simpletextexchangeintoa horrorfilm.Its
titlecreditsarefrom thedirectorwho
designed those of HBO’s True Detective,and
The Vow’s many collaborators comefrom
documentary film and TV. In its formandits
st yle, The Vow screams “elevated.”
Underneath, though, I couldfeelmy
brain pinging in response to The Vowinthe
way it does to reality programming—tothe
voyeuristic closeness of it. The sameis true
for long stretches of Netflix’s college-football
docuseries, Last Chance U, and theentirety
of Tiger King. Joe Exotic, the subjectofthe
latter series, had been trying to makea real-ity show about himself featuring much of
the same material that ended up in the
docuseries. But by folding the reality-show
production into the docuseries narrative,
Tiger King could take advantage of the
material while holding itself at arm’s length.
Being about a reality show feels superior to
being one. The central appeal of one of my
favorite docuseries from the past two years,
Showtime’s Couples Therapy, is that its
directors were able to capture therapy as it
happened over the course of several months.
It’s like being in a room with couples as they
discuss their most private thoughts. And
while its art design and ethical foundation
are vastly different, Couples Therapy is so
much like a reality-show premise that it was
the premise for a six-season reality show on
VH1 also called Couples Therapy.Putting
the two series side by side is an uncanny
illustration of prestige glow-up.On one
side, night-vision footage of Flavor Flav
storming out of a bedroom in a mansion
where celebrity couples have beenseques-
tered to create reality-TV drama.On the
other, a wood-paneled, neutral-toned thera-
pist’s office where a clinical psychologist
looks carefully at the well-heeled couple
across from her on the sofa.
Docuseries have become so “invogue,”
The Vow’s Karim Amer told me, thatturning
a documentary-film project into a series can
be the easiest way to get it made, even if that
means stretching it out unnecessarily into a
series-length format. But the underlying
fuel for the docuseries boom, Amer thinks,
is that “we are living in a crazy time.”“People
want to go deeper,” he said. “The documen-
tary series is in many ways the new novel,
[like] the way that Dickens would write
long stories. People want to feel like they’re
going chapter by chapter into worlds.”
As I listened to Amer discuss the “novel-
istic” elements of the docuseries, Ithought
about all the ways that comparison makes
sense. One of the great innovations of the
European novel was free indirect discourse.
It offered new modes to access someone
else’s private self, creating an almost alarm-
ing proximity with characters by allowing
their interiority to slip into a narrator’s voice.
What better comparison to the overwhelm-
ing intimacy of The Vow? But in the same
moment, I thought about Charles McGrath
announcing that TV is the “prime-time
novel” in a 1995 New York Times Magazine
essay and how many times DavidSimon’s
work has been compared with Dickens’s.
How often have I heard TV creatives
describe their prestige dramas as “novelis-
tic” and “Dickensian”? Docuseries are the
newest conversation-consumingform—
adding a nod to Dickens is just the chef ’s
kiss of TV legitimacy. ■Anglo-American
culture has yet
to meet something
lowbrow that
it didn’t find a
way to repackage
as classy.