documentaries

Wednesday would have been Marvel Comics leader Stan Lee’s 100th birthday. To celebrate, Disney+ announced that an original documentary on the man will arrive at some time in 2023. Lee died at age 95 in 2018. He was the cocreator of Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four, among many others, and his cameos in the blockbuster Marvel films based on those characters are eagerly awaited by fans.

Our America: Lowballed was triggered by the story of how one Black family “whitewashed” their home — stripped it of family photos, artwork, even toiletries — and had a White friend stand in during an appraisal. The appraised value of their home jumped nearly $500,000 from the previous one.

ABC News is doubling down on documentaries and docuseries, launching a new non-fiction division called ABC News Studios. The studio already has 15 series in various stages of production, as well as 3 feature-length documentaries, which will live under the ABC News Films banner.

TVNewsCheck’s Michael Depp talks with Erika Dilday, executive producer of PBS’s POV documentary series as the show enters its 35^th season, looking at what makes potent documentaries work and how local TV stations can make successful forays into the space by drawing on their strong community ties. A full transcript of the conversation is included.

Greed. Betrayal. Family backstabbing. The rise of the Murdochs, the world’s most powerful media family, which was chronicled in a three-part, 20,000-word investigation published in The New York Times Magazine in 2019, had all the right ingredients for a gripping documentary series. Some might say it had Succession-level drama. The drama was brought indeed in The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, a new documentary series that premiered on CNN+ last month and will be broadcast on CNN later this year.

HBO has pulled tonight’s premiere of The Larry David Story, a two-part documentary about the award-winning producer/writer and comedian, at David’s request. In a tweet on Monday, HBO Documentaries announced “The #LarryDavidStory on @HBOMax is being postponed. Instead, Larry has decided he wants to do it in front of an audience. Stay tuned for more info.”

Susan Zirinsky, former CBS News president, is back in a job where she can do one of her favorite things: tell a few stories. Zirinsky heads See It Now Studios, an independent production unit that she expects to launch documentary films and series for a range of ViacomCBS properties as well as outside parties. “I’m not a sliver of the network, or producing just for the inside,” she says. “My mandate is to be a studio.”

Docuseries mushroomed in 2021 as streamers ramped up their offerings, and viewers were the beneficiaries. The wide array of series ran the gamut from investigative to ruminative, tackling sports, crime and music. At their best, they stood tall against the year’s top TV series overall.

NBC News is an enterprise built on 30-minute and 60-minute increments of TV journalism. Its executives are now starting to think about longer blocks of time. NBC News’ presence at Toronto International Film Festival this week signals its growing ambitions in the documentary space after forming the Studios in early 2020.

Local police officers responding to 911 calls in the Shreveport area sometimes encounter people suffering mental breakdowns, often leading to tragic results. KSLA’s Breakdown: The Frontline Response to the Mental Health Crisis documentary led to a change in how the area’s first responders react to psychiatric emergencies.