Exploring the emotional depths of ‘The End of an Era’

IN THE first episode of Taylor Swift's new docu-series, the cameras follow her backstage while she's dressed in one of the sparkly costumes that she wore on her blockbuster Eras Tour.

- EMILY YAHR

TAYLOR Swift in a scene from The End of an Era docu-series. | The Washington Post

Just minutes before she is about to perform at London's sold-out Wembley Stadium, the pop superstar stops in an area with a small sofa, where she sits down and cries.

Her mother, also in tears, approaches with a tissue. "I know you helped them," Andrea Swift says. "I know it doesn't seem like it, but I know you helped them."

The moment was filmed right after Swift met privately with survivors and families of the victims of horrific violence weeks earlier in Southport, England, when a 17-year-old boy stormed a Taylor Swift-themed dance class with a knife and killed three little girls. Days after the attack, Swift had to cancel shows in Vienna when police arrested men accused of plotting a terrorist attack at the concert site.

"From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that's very unreal a lot of the time," Swift says in a voiceover. "But it's my job to kind of be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform. That's just the way it's got to be."

Soon, she's onstage beaming to the tens of thousands of ecstatic fans in the audience, who scream and sing along to every word. It's common knowledge that the 2023-24 Eras Tour was a phenomenon. The highest-grossing concert tour in history earned more than $2 billion, boosting local economies in every city Swift visited across a twoyear, 149-show trek around the globe. So it's telling that producers included a reminder of her behind-the-scenes devastation so early in The End of an Era, a six-episode documentary about the making of the tour that debuted on Disney+.

Despite the fact that her job requires her to get onstage and provide an escape from reality for millions of people, the horrors of real life affect her, too.