— Marisa Carroll, features editor, New York
| Scrolling through your Netflix home screen, there are a million documentaries these days. Or are they reality shows? Or are they stealth advertisements for pop stars desperate for a brand reboot? In this delicious entertainment industry deep dive, New York’s Reeves Wiedeman digs into the documentary world and finds that it’s a little of all three — and that filmmakers and their subjects are working themselves into knots trying to navigate this new landscape. The streaming documentary boom has led to multi-season deals (scoop for The Jinx fans: Reeves reports that Andrew Jarecki is currently working on a sequel) and fierce competition for sources (or, as one agent called the victims of R. Kelly’s sex cult, “talent”) who are more likely than ever to be paid to appear in films. Streamers and subjects have more editorial control over the storytelling we see on screen. Where does it leave filmmakers? A must-read for any doc junkie, or at least anyone who watched Tiger King (everyone). |
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| Photo: NEON (Beauty), Netflix (Tinder, Tiger, Dahmer, Harry, Cheer, Fyre, Icarus), Apple TV+ (Eilish, Magic), Searchlight (Soul) |
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| The policing reforms being considered in response to Tyre Nichols’s death would probably not have prevented his killing, writes Zak Cheney-Rice. But government officials have gotten better at preempting public outrage. |
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| “Everyone wanted to look like Kylie Jenner. Now they want to look like Bella Hadid.” The Cut’s Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz reports on the end of the facial-filler era and the new pursuit of “snatched” cheeks and jawlines. |
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| Congressional Republicans’ choice to restore committee privileges to Marjorie Taylor Greene while stripping them from Ilhan Omar trivializes antisemitism and exposes the party’s hypocrisy, argues Jonathan Chait. |
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