Near the fifteenth minute of nearly every high-profile documentary produced in the past five years, the formula becomes apparent. With a prime lens blowing out the background, a historian gazes slightly off-camera in a beautifully lit scene. Cut to a yellowed photo with a slow push-in. Play the strings. The reenactment begins, with an actor’s hand—never their face—picking up a phone, a knife, or a letter. It is capable. It has been polished. It’s also beginning to resemble wallpaper.
Ed Sayer, a British producer, recently expressed what many in the industry have been whispering for some time: the craft of documentary has subtly evolved into something less shocking and safer than it once was. He refers to it as the “dumbbell problem.” On one end of the television spectrum are the historic productions with substantial budgets. The inexpensive and joyful churn at the other. The middle, which was once home to observational documentaries, is rapidly disappearing. Younger directors aren’t being dispatched to police stations or airports to wait for a story to come to light. They are given a deck and instructed to produce six true crime episodes by the fall.
It’s difficult to ignore how this has occurred concurrently with another change that the industry discusses less publicly. By their own admission, the documentary world is experiencing something akin to a mental health emergency. An organization called DocuMentality started bringing the discussion into the open following the deaths of several filmmakers in recent years.
Rebecca Day, a British psychotherapist who co-founded it, has been candid about her observations. Editors claim to be crash test dummies. cinematographers who were unaware of the trauma they had internalized. Although the work has always been challenging, the circumstances—such as short turnaround times, limited protections, and unstable freelance work—have become more difficult.
Strangely, some of these date back to 2001. That year saw the release of Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under, which subtly altered what viewers anticipated from tales of loss and death. The documentary world came to a serious end after that. Around the world, television shows about grief, funeral homes, and mourning customs started to appear. They were often lovely and thoughtful. Additionally, as one scholarly study noted, they hardly ever displayed the body. There’s something about today’s appetite for challenging subjects that only works when the difficulty is kept at a respectful distance.
Right now, audiences are being driven away by that gloss and distance. A nineteen-year-old who was raised on uncensored TikTok confessions and YouTube essayists may not necessarily desire a tasteful recreation. They prefer something closer, rougher, and less obviously manufactured. It remains to be seen if the industry will allow them to have it. Speaking with people who have worked in factual television for decades gives me the impression that the gatekeepers are still optimizing for the wrong audience, chasing BAFTA panels instead of the viewers who have already moved on to Substack documentaries and bedroom-produced twenty-minute video essays.
So, is this the end of documentaries or the beginning of something else? Most likely the latter, though its exact form is still unknown. The form has endured worse. It endured the emergence of reality television. It made it through streaming. Its own caution is something it might not endure, at least in its current respectable, interview-heavy form. It’s unlikely that the next great documentary, whatever it may be, is currently being commissioned. Someone who hasn’t yet been informed what a documentary should look like is filming it on someone’s phone, somewhere. That may be the most optimistic aspect of it all.
