Celebrity Docs Have Taken Over the Emmys – Charm

If it feels like there’s been an uptick of celebrity-centric documentary projects nominated for Emmys in recent years — specifically, in the categories of best documentary/nonfiction special (one- or two-part projects) and best documentary/nonfiction series (projects of more than two parts) — it’s because there has been. Not long ago, it was rare to have more than one celebrity-focused nominee in either category. This year, four of the five nominated doc specials are about celebs — Prime Video’s John Candy: I Like Me, Netflix’s Marty,Life Is Short, HBO Max’s Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and HBO’s My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay. And the same is true of three of the five doc series nominees — Apple TV’s Mr. Scorsese and Netflix’s Rafa and Sean Combs: The Reckoning.

For most of TV history, nonfiction projects were funded by government grants and aired on free public broadcasting, so they tended to center on “serious” subject matter. In the 1980s, PBS ventured into celebrity territory with American Masters, Susan Lacy’s doc series comprising feature-length profiles of cultural artists, which proved popular with viewers and Emmy voters. At about the same time, nascent cable networks required edgy programming to lure people to pay for TV. Finding and funding such content became the specialty of Sheila Nevins, HBO’s docs chief at the time, who not infrequently used celebrities as a vehicle to explore larger social issues in doc specials — for example, 1998’s Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth was really about the First Amendment — and wound up with more Emmys for producing than anyone else in history.

The growth of cable brought a wave of other projects centered on famous people, some more substantive, like Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio (launched in 1984) and ESPN’s 30 for 30 (2009), than others, like E!’s E! True Hollywood Story (1996) and VH1’s Behind the Music (1997); all four of these examples, and others, wound up with Emmy noms. But it was the arrival of Peak TV in the 2010s, thanks to the onslaught of streaming services that required exclusive content to attract and retain subscribers, that exploded the number of celebrity-centric docs. Now standouts from cable, like ESPN’s Michael Jordan doc series The Last Dance, were joined in the marketplace (and at the Emmys) by standouts from places like Disney+ (The Beatles: Get Back) and Netflix (Beckham), which spend more and produce more of them and find that they often break through the content clutter better than other sorts of projects.

The documentary branch of the Film Academy, which solely determines documentary Oscar nominees, has increasingly avoided celebrity-centric projects like the plague. But the TV Academy’s documentary programming peer group, which solely determines the doc special and doc series Emmy nominees, seems to have accepted them. The branch still nominates other sorts of projects — this year, a nature doc series (Nat Geo’s Ocean With David Attenborough) and doc specials about history (PBS’ The American Revolution) and true crime (HBO’s The Yogurt Shop Murders) — but in much smaller numbers than they used to.

Nevins praises this year’s nonfiction Emmy nominees but worries about the underlying reason for the move toward celebrity-centric projects. “It really started with Trump. The world is falling apart, so where are the documentaries about that? People aren’t making or buying them because they don’t want anyone coming after them.” She adds, “Instinctively, as a maker of a documentary, you want it to be seen. And if you want it to be seen and you want to make a living, then you have to make something that has a shot of getting bought.”