How docu-mania took streaming by storm
LOCKDOWN HAS DISTORTED OUR PERCEPTIONS OF time, making months of mandatory monotony congeal into a goo of boredom and malaise. In fact, one of the only reliable ways of marking time during this pandemic year has been through the series of buzzy documentaries that bound us together in isolation.
The clock started, of course, with last March. April brought ESPN’s ratings smash a retrospective of Michael Jordan’s final NBA season that hit the spot for fans in live-sports withdrawal. HBO kicked off summer with an adaptation of late crime writer Michelle McNamara’s book and ended it with an inside look at the NXIVM “sex cult” that set Twitter ablaze weekly. Nature doc now an Oscar nominee, became an unlikely global hit in the fall. Most recently, FX and fueled a reckoning over the star’s mistreatment.
