Prime time for documentaries
HBO team talks about the genre and storytelling
With documentaries a central part of the national conversation, it’s easy to forget that not only were they once relatively hard to find but they also had a damning reputation as being good for you — the kiss of death, in entertainment terms.
In the 1970s, a new player helped change that.
“HBO was doing documentaries that were not spinach,” said Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney, whose eight projects for the cable network date back to “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” in 2012 and include the recent “Agents of Chaos,” about the hacking of the 2016 election. “They were exciting.”
And so was the person in charge: the flamboyant, larger-than-life Sheila Nevins, who had been with the network since 1979 and, as head of the documentary unit, steered unscripted programming into must-see TV and water-cooler fodder. In early 2018, after Nevins left the network, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller, who already worked in the company’s documentary division, stepped into the role and now share the title of executive vice president of documentary and family programming for HBO.
Abraham, 55, and Heller, 52, come across as low-key, pragmatic and methodical, which is a handy attitude when you oversee a department that was responsible for about 30 features and a halfdozen series last year — a relentless pace.
Right now, HBO is in the middle of a block of five features, released weekly, centering on bad deeds: Still to come are “Baby God” (Dec. 2), about a fertility doctor who impregnated his unaware patients; “Alabama Snake” (Dec. 9), about a Pentecostal minister who attempted to murder his wife with a snake; and “The Art of Political Murder” (Dec. 16), about the killing of a Guatemalan activist.
Abraham and Heller chatted in a recent video interview about the state of the genre, what they look for in documentaries and whether some of them are just too long. (Hint: Their answer fits their approach to a T.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation and a follow-up email.
Q: We’re in the middle of a programming block centering on true crimes and transgressions. Is this part of a new strategy for HBO? Abraham: We did have a grouping of crime films, or loosely connected by crime, last year as well. We don’t have a mandate to develop any specific content areas, but stories about crimes and their reverberations have always been part of the HBO documentary DNA. It’s a way to explore the complexity of human nature and the profound impact that crime and the criminal justice system can have on individuals and society at large.
Heller: I think the weekly crime block is a way of experimenting with whether or not audiences would want to come back every week to a different story. We’ll see if that’s a good way to do it. More typically, we’ve had them spread out throughout the schedule. This is a way of signaling, “If this is your jam, we’re going to give you something new and different every week, and much deeper and broader stories than you might expect.”
Q: How has Netflix changed the doc game? Is it any harder to get the stuff you want now that you’re competing with Hulu, Showtime, FX and others?
Abraham: It’s great for the field that there are more outlets than ever that recognize the value and appeal of nonfiction; it’s created so many more opportunities for the documentary community. It also means we’re competing for people’s time and attention more than ever, but in many ways that fuels the work to be better. Q: What do you think makes a good documentary?
Abraham: It’s a question of being open to where the story takes you and alert to the cues and the developments that are happening, being able to take advantage of those, and then be able to craft a narrative almost in retrospect, looking back at it. Often in the retelling or looking at archival footage, a new perspective will emerge, or something you didn’t expect. Sometimes it’s the aesthetic style that propels the form in new directions. We have a series coming up from the Duplass brothers, “The Lady and the Dale,” in which the directors Zackary Drucker and Nick Cammilleri use innovative animation that melds seamlessly with the subjects’ recollections.
Heller: The surprise is key: at something that changes the direction of your film or at a story that is so much deeper and wider than you ever understood from some headlines. Even with historical looks, the best ones feel as though you are watching them unfold in real time. “Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered” is such a good example of that — just the ticktock of these things happening versus a vérité film that is literally unfolding in real time in front of the cameras the way “The Vow” [about NXIVM] does.
Q: “The Vow” had nine episodes, and there’s going to be another season next year. What do you think of the explosion of multiparters?
Abraham: We had always done the occasional series, but I think it was after 2018 when we were really given the opportunity to expand into that subgenre. Heller: It was a number of factors, including the confidence — or the good guess — that this content can engage in the same way drama does: over time. That was a great challenge to think about and a great way to think about nonfiction sort of expanding over real estate in a way that keeps people coming back for more.
Q: What do you think of the grumblings that some series feel padded? Abraham: There can be instances where something is stretched out too far for some people’s taste. We’re trying to be mindful of that. For our purposes, longer isn’t better.