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Who hasn’t cited a
tidbit about the British
royals, only to realize
it came straight from
The Crown?endings—proliferated from cable to
broadcast, but especially among the
warring platforms of streaming.
Six years later, the docudrama
has become ubiquitous. Even NBC’s
stodgy Law & Order launched its
own true-crime anthology, with a
season on the Menendez brothers
starring Edie Falco. And why not?
Docudramas are magnets for A-list
actors. From Michelle Williams in
Fosse/Verdon to Ewan McGregor
in Halston, portraying a real person
with an extraordinary story is now
understood to be as quick a route to
the Emmys as it is to the Oscars. And
the more crowded the marketplace
gets, the more it helps to center a
show on a topic that already has a
foothold in the public discourse.
What’s likely to draw a bigger
audience —a great series about a
fictional tech startup or an OK one
about an app used by millions of
people around the world every day?
I don’t mean to imply that all, or
even most, docudramas are cynical
branding exercises. There have been
some great ones in recent years,
from HBO’s devastating Chernobyl to
Netflix’s When They See Us, for which
creator Ava DuVernay recruited a cast
of talented young actors to revisit
the story of the Central Park Five.
Mrs. America, FX’s look back at ’70s
feminism and its discontents, used its
all-star ensemble (with big names like
Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, and Tracey
Ullman supporting a mesmerizing
turn from Cate Blanchett as Phyllis
Schlafly) as far more than a gimmick.
These standouts have given us new
perspective on current and historical
events in a way that only fiction can.
Whether it’s The People v. O.J. Simpson
spending a full episode on what it
felt like to be Clark, a public servant
who became a tabloid punch line
overnight, or Netflix’s Unbelievable
weighing the impact of a botched rape
investigation on a teenage victim fresh
out of foster care, these shows draw
out human elements of stories that
viewers previously couldn’t or didn’t
want to acknowledge. They also make
connections to the way we live, and the
way society functions, in the present.
Too quirky to be a masterpiece,
Inventing Anna at least builds a
provocative argument about the title
character—that she was more failed
hero than sociopathic villain—while
putting wealth and the transactional
nature of so many interpersonal
relationships under a microscope.
Yet for each docudrama with some-
thing to say, there are several more
(see: Showtime’s The Comey Rule,
Hulu’s Dopesick, Netflix’s The Serpent,
Bravo’s Dirty John) that function as
audiovisual Wikipedia pages, over-
flowing with names, dates, and statis-
tics but light on narrative. Others, like
Pam & Tommy, bungle their attempts
at socially conscious revisionism so
badly that after six or eight episodes,
they abruptly end without arriving
at a meaningful conclusion. And thefew that aren’t indifferent to style can
be astoundingly derivative. Super
Pumped treads the fine line between
bro- friendly entertainment and bro-
critical satire, racking up a major debt
to Adam McKay and Aaron Sorkin.You could argue that at least the
new wave of docudramas is educating
viewers about current events and
recent history. The thing is, most
just rehash stories that have already
been widely consumed in a different
format—or three. The Dropout,
based on a podcast and notable for
Amanda Seyfried’s sensitive portrayal
of Holmes’ strangeness, follows a
best-selling book, John Carreyrou’s
Bad Blood, and a buzzy HBO doc,
The Inventor; Apple is developing a
feature-film adaptation of Bad Blood
from McKay and Jennifer Lawrence.
(Then again, The Dropout seems
downright necessary compared
with Joe vs. Carole, a restaging of a
docuseries that existed purely to gawk
at weird tiger people.)
Despite performances that can
be thrilling to watch, in 2022,
docudramas’ overlap with nonfiction
storytelling poses a more troubling
threat than mere redundancy. From
fake news to irresponsible punditry,
misinformation has proliferated
on our TV screens as well as in our
social media feeds and podcast
queues. Inventing Anna obliquely
acknowledges this, opening episodes
with a disclaimer: “This whole story
is completely true. Except for all
the parts that are totally made up.”
The tone might be cheeky, but the
transparency is refreshing.
It would be unfair, and bad for TV as
an art form, to expect scripted shows
to stick to the truth. But given the in-
creasingly slippery boundary between
fact and fiction, the current outpour-
ing of docudramas still seems bound
to chip away at our collective under-
standing of how real events happened.
Who among us hasn’t cited a tidbit
about the British royals, only to realize
it came straight from The Crown? The
more fiction dilutes our perception of
reality, the more vulnerable our fragile
historical record is to bad actors. And I
don’t just mean hams. □