REALITY CHECK

The boom-or glut-in TELEVISION DOCUMENTARIES has sparked a reckoning among filmmakers and subjects who worry there are no industrywide ethical standards for how to make one.

- REEVES WIEDEMAN

WHEN DAN COGAN co-founded Impact Partners in 2007 with the goal of making good documentaries that also did good for the world, it was the beginning of what he and others now look back on as the golden age of the form. After decades of relegation to art houses and public television, films like An Inconvenient Truth, Super Size Me, and anything by Michael Moore were suddenly finding an audience and making money.

The returns were modest by Hollywood standards (Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time and only the 589th-highest-grossing movie), but so were the costs (James Cameron blew through Moore's $6 million budget in five minutes of Avatar: The Way of Water).

When streaming began its Hollywood takeover in the 2010s, documentaries presented themselves as a low-cost way to burnish a reputation. Netflix won its first three Oscars for documentaries, including Icarus, a 2017 investigation into the Russian sports-doping scheme, which was produced by Cogan.

But as Netflix and other streamers battled for market share, documentaries themselves began to change. The streamers had enough data to know what people liked-murders, celebrities, episodes that end with a cliffhanger-and by 2020, when Netflix was releasing a new documentary or docuseries every week, the streamers were competing less for awards than for the next true-crime hit. Between 2018 and 2021, demand for documentaries on streaming services more than doubled, and films that once had hoped to eke out a couple of million bucks at the box office were now selling to streamers for $10 million, or $15 million, or $20 million.