Netflix Documentaries We Watched While Under Quarantine
(Originally appeared in New Yorker, April 2020)
“Unlikely Animal Friends with Benefits”
“‘He Also Tipped Reasonably Well’: Wringing the Last Feel-Good Drops Out of Mr. Rogers”
“Aging Men with Ponytails Speak Rhapsodically About Some Dead Session Drummer”
“Robert Durst: The Untold Belches”
“You’re Smart for Hating That Politician: An Algorithmically Generated Confirmation-Bias Documentary”
“The Adult Clown Whose Dad Was Somehow the Creepy One”
“It Wasn’t All Bad: Meatless Mondays at Jonestown”
“Tiger King 2: Big-Fanged Bloody Bloopers”
“Approaching Everest: Actually, Base Camp Is Good Enough”
“Bastards at the Gate: The Story of Baseball’s Craziest Ticket-Takers”
“Michael Pollan’s Let’s Walk Around the Food Court”
“Medical Miracles 3: My Spleen Is a Ball of Snakes”
“Some Extra Photos of JonBenét Ramsey We Just Unearthed, Set to Eerie Music”
“Whatever It Takes: The Wit and Wisdom of the Fyre Festival Evian Blow-Job Guy”
“Fantastic Drone Footage 4: Two Wolves Eat a Discarded Hoagie”
“Outrageous Sexual Fetishists in Their Messy Bedrooms”
“Scientology Takes Another Beating”
“A Turd in the Hot Tub: Horror Stories from DoubleTree Cleaning Staff”
“I Filmed Myself Pulling Apart This Old Cuckoo Clock”
“Charles Manson: The Hamburg Years”
“The Secret Life of People Who Pretend to Be Chimps”
“ESPN 30 for 30: That Night Tommy Lasorda Ate Twenty-four Hotdogs”
“The Dark Side of the Franklin Mint”
“Who Killed Leaping John? The Ultimate Frisbee Doping Scandal”
“Jiro Dreams of the ihop Build-Your-Own-Pancake Combo”
“Dads Who Watch a Ton of Nazi Docs”
“Ted Bundy: America’s Yummiest Serial Killer”
“Michael Moore Accomplishes Nothing”
“The Plant-Based Food Revolution That Will Transform the Way You Eat for Nearly Two Weeks”
“Old Cranks Making Weird Eye Contact: An Errol Morris Omnibus”
“I Thought That’d Be Harder: The Civil War’s Most Bloodless Battle”
“R-O-I-D: The Gorilla Hormone Scandal That Rocked the National Spelling Bee”
“More Than Just a Serial Killer: John Wayne Gacy’s Unparalleled Clowning and Tumbler Skills”
“Periodontal Disease Me! Morgan Spurlock’s Year Without Flossing”
“Dogs: Pretty Stupid in the Grand Scheme of Things”
“He Stayed Fat”
“Kids Winning High-School Basketball Championships But Then Failing When It Comes to Life”
“Taylor Swift: Coached Toward a Simulacrum of Candor”
“Up from Above: The Alien-Anal-Probe Aetna Insurance Conspiracy”
“Wry Brit vs. Confused Redneck: A Travelogue”
“Bratz Dolls: My Totally Bratty Obsession, by Werner Herzog”
“American Masters: The Guy Who Invented Cheese-in-the-Crust Pizza”
“District 14: The Story of a Single Congressional Race That Will Renew Your Faith in Democracy Until the Next Time You Check Twitter”
–With Scott Jacobson, Todd Levin, Jason Roeder and Ted Travelstead