documentaries

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.

Court TV relaunched in May after more than a decade off the air, and now the network is branching into original programming with a 37-hour docuseries about the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

The first Peabody Awards of 2019 were announced today, with eight documentaries being honored and Kartemquin Films (Minding the Gap, Hoops Dreams) set for an Institutional Award for its “commitment to unflinching documentary filmmaking and telling an American history rooted in social justice and the stories of the marginalized.”

Perry Wolff, a groundbreaking television producer whose documentaries took viewers on a tour of the White House with Jacqueline Kennedy and awakened them to widespread hunger in America, died on Feb. 17 in Portland, Ore. Wolff was credited as a writer, director or producer of some 600 hours of broadcasts over more than five decades, mostly for CBS News. His broadcasts won 17 Emmy Awards, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards in broadcast journalism and an Academy Award nomination for best documentary short film, for writing and directing An Essay on Matisse in 1996 for PBS.