Just suffered through their Three Mile Island "documentary" yesterday while working on something else. Apparently Bechtel operates a hit squad in Pennsylvania and everyone in a 5 mile radius got severe cancer. Out of four hours you get about 10 minutes of meaningful detail about the incident; the rest is headline rehash you can get on the first page of a Google search, emotional personal stories and a lot of self promotion.

All the true crime stuff is retired officers cashing in. So much for books.

> Out of four hours you get about 10 minutes of meaningful detail about the incident

Most documentaries have always been very low on information density. Even universally loved ones like something from David Attenborough are mostly a collection of disconnected (yet amazing) film snippets with a bit of commentary over the top. It's only gotten worse as narrative has become more of the focus.

There are exceptions, but when it comes to conveying meaningful information and detailed analysis youtube is far superior than mainstream documentaries.

Nature documentaries are a different beast from other documentaries. They are primarily about showing great nature footage. If you happen to learn something from it, that’s just a happy side effect.

>> Most documentaries have always been very low on information density.

Except everything done by the BBC. I am so sick of slow-paced american docs that inevitably swing into conspiracy rants and crying interviews. If there is a BBC doc availible on a subject, that is the one i will risk my hour of free time watching.

I too watched the 3 Mile Island netflix thing. The only fact i trust is the coincidence of The China Syndrome hitting theaters the week prior the accident, and only after i verified through imdb.

I want more historical documentaries like BBC's amazing The Death of Yugoslavia [1], a minute-by-minute breakdown of the collapse of Yugoslavia and subsequent civil war. It tackles a complex subject in a refreshingly dispassionate and informative way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Yugoslavia

To be fair, they did interview a cartoon villain for balance.

There was no real attempt to compare the enormous toll of deaths and environmental damage of fossil fuels compared to nuclear. I kept thinking "did Shell commission this?".

I feel this is just true for every non-Ken Burns documentary I've ever seen and I find it kind of annoying. They always seem to have some axe to grind and just do anything they can to support that biased thesis with no room for caveats or shades of gray.

while I think most documentarists have a specific point of view which comes through, some of what netflix has been peddling is way over the top.

To name one, Seaspiracy[0] is not like your friend who's from the opposite side of he political spectrum, it's more the crazy guy with "moon nazis are coming" sign.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy

I think this is more a feature of people flocking to more shallow documentaries, which pushes them up the recommendation funnel.

Icarus was fantastic, for instance, but of potentially limited appeal (which is a shame, as it touches on a lot of topics of broad interest from doping in sport to political intrigue).

Icarus was absolutely amazing. I expected a subversive feel-good investigation of doping in cycling, but got something even more fascinating and disturbing.

There are myriad fascinating documentaries that aren’t about hammering home a point of view about recent political or social issues. For a very accessible list of recommendations, check out this CineFix video: https://youtu.be/0nisJRrsNmc

Have you watched his Vietnam series?

BBC documentaries are really high quality and not so biased as American documentaries.

I'm currently watching the Andy Warhol documentary series. 20% of the documentary is about his art and 80% of it is about who he slept with.

Sounds like many of the things Vox produces--ideological content ostensibly labeled as "explainers".

I hate to break this to you but that's all documentaries in general. Every documentary has the goal of convincing you of something.

This is quite literally not true. Source: I have a film degree, took classes on documentary film. I posted this elsewhere but here’s a nice video with a ton of documentary recommendations. https://youtu.be/0nisJRrsNmc

You are watching the wrong ones.

Watch some that are on film festivals, on quality tv channels (in Europe public tv broadcasting channels) etc.

Usually someone just wants to show interesting stuff without a political agenda.

Unless they are doing it the opposite way - have and agenda and want to support it with their documentary film.

Ever watch Modern Marvels on the History Channel? The only point of those is “look at this cool shit!”

Both the “look at cool shit” and the “here’s how this simple looking thing actually is really complex and how it works” type of documentaries seem to mainly be on YouTube now.

YouTube is perfect for 10 minutes of content without having to try to stretch it to an hour.

> YouTube is perfect for 10 minutes of content without having to try to stretch it to an hour.

10 minutes has no relation to the complexity of the subject matter; 10 minutes is derived from the attention span of youtube viewers (and it varies a bit, but sub-15 seems to be the most common). An hour of content may be pruned until only 10 minutes are left, or two minutes of content may be stretched to 10.

Example chosen from the videos they're recommending to me now: Two documentaries from the same channel. One is about the Bob Semple tank, a wacky prototype from New Zealand designed by an amateur and never mass produced and never used. The other is about the 1960 U-2 spyplane shootdown over the Soviet Union, a serious diplomatic incident. One is 9:08 long, the other is 9:20 seconds long. What are the odds that both subjects just happen to have almost exactly the same amount of content to say about them?

Zero chance of that. Compare the articles on wikipedia, the U-2 shootdown article is 5x longer than the article for the tank. The two documentaries are the same length because this guy always makes his documentaries roughly this length because this is what the system rewards.