The global South has been key to Netflix’s worldwide expansion. In 2011, Latin America became one of the first markets explored by the company, following its initial push to reach audiences outside the United States. India was added in 2016, the same year the service became available in most countries in Asia and Africa. This expansion came on the heels of Netflix’s transformation from a DVD rental service to a subscription video-on-demand platform, a move that sealed its status as an internet company. The second decade of the twenty-first century also saw Netflix grow from distributor to producer of original media content. In addition to reaching audiences throughout the global South, Netflix now produces local-language programs in countries such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, to name a few. Already an important market for Netflix, the global South became thus a valuable feature in the company’s global brand.
This chapter looks at the global South by focusing on one specific genre: the global Netflix documentary. It sees this type of documentary as a metonymic extension of the company itself, treating the documentaries as emblematic of Netflix’s global brand. Netflix’s interest in documentary precedes, of course, its rise as a media studio and its growth as a global internet company. As Joshua Glick notes, documentary offerings have figured prominently on the company’s website since its launch in 1998, helping distinguish Netflix from the large video rental companies that existed then, most of which treated documentary as a specialized niche relegated to the periphery of their media inventories.1 The beginning of the streaming service in 2007 and the company’s expansion into the production of original content amplified this interest in documentary, creating a closer connection between documentary media and the Netflix brand. Documentaries bring distinction to Netflix’s content library, contributing “quality entertainment” to the service’s website.2 The global Netflix documentary, in its turn, resonates with the kind of cosmopolitanism that characterizes the company’s brand image.
No single feature suffices to define the global Netflix documentary. Just as Netflix documentaries broadly speaking encompass a wide variety of themes and genres—from biographies of celebrities to nature films, from true crime to social-problem documentaries—the term “global documentary” suggests a multifaceted and at times slippery category.3 At the level of content, global Netflix documentaries “travel” the world with an appetite for stories centered on both human and nonhuman subjects, allegedly revisiting a familiar narrative that implicates local specificity and global connectivity. Nature documentaries, for example, cover geographically diverse corners of the globe, while favoring a planetary, supranational perspective on the world (as is the case with the ambitious series Our Living World). Documentaries that address social problems focus on local stories in order to appeal to our sense of shared humanity (a trope explored in the third season of Tales by Light, a series I discuss below). And those that celebrate global diversity turn to culturally specific experiences but end up revealing suggestive parallels between different cultures (a common feature in travel documentaries centered on food culture, for example).
From a formal standpoint, these documentaries include a variety of approaches, sometimes evoking conventions reminiscent of travel photography and National Geographic, at other times incorporating features familiar from the more recent history of reality television. Despite the wide range of genres and topics involved, though, some attributes remain constant from one documentary to another. Like most projects connected to the company’s name, these documentaries are expected to contain entertainment value, allegedly bridging the gap between a tradition of independent-minded documentary filmmaking and the commercial exigencies of the platform. Polished aesthetics and high production values further amplify this popular appeal, as does the emphasis on conventional narratives centered on individual characters. All this points to a certain “quality standard,” in which differences of content and style—as well as diversity of culture, ethnicity, nation, and landscape—are outweighed by the production values adopted by the company.
For the purposes of this discussion, what I call the global Netflix documentary should also conform to more precise criteria. I am interested in projects that involve not one but multiple locations and, in some cases, movement across national, geographic, or cultural borders. Nationally or locally specific projects per se may not fit these criteria, as they could fail to represent at the textual level the ideal of globality and the sense of cosmopolitanism that are integral to Netflix’s brand.4 While scanning the website for global documentaries, I have also chosen to privilege those that are explicitly associated with the company’s name, projects that come with the “Netflix Original” label attached to them. Although I am aware that Netflix’s investment in these projects may vary significantly from one documentary to another, I tend to regard the label Netflix Original as a useful indicator of how the documentaries are expected to represent the Netflix brand.
This chapter contributes to two of the debates included in this book: the analysis of content produced for the streaming platform and the discussion of a global-local dynamics based on the presumption of universal storytelling. I also consider the technological affordances of the platform and the significance of the Netflix brand as a sort of agent shaping the encounter between Netflix users and the global South. The latter often appears less as a geopolitical reality than an array of subjects and experiences in the service of the company’s brand image—a desirable sign of alterity and, at the same time, an emblem of Netflix’s global reach. Underlying my analysis of the global Netflix documentary is also a more general critique of Netflix’s refashioning of documentary media as a standardized product that meets the needs of a global video-on-demand platform, the latest chapter in a history that has reshaped television documentary after the 1980s.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for a large number of streaming media consumers Netflix has redefined the conventions and expectations attributed to documentary media. For those with little exposure to a tradition dating back to the silent cinema era, Netflix may in fact provide a yardstick with which to approach documentary media in general, thus reducing to a standardized, narrative-oriented product a multifaceted practice with a history that spans over a hundred years. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow could very well be describing the Netflix documentary when they criticize the dominance of narrative conventions in contemporary documentary media, even if they do not refer specifically to the company. Storytelling, they note, “is not the most or only effective form for documentary, as affecting as it can be. Not everything should be molded into a story” (emphasis in the original).5 To be sure, this interest in narrative is not new to the history of documentary, but its current prevalence—particularly in US documentary—tends to constrain the practice of documentary making and impoverish the experiences available to documentary audiences. Similarly, prescribing to documentary media a standard largely based on entertainment value risks distorting the ethos that has traditionally guided documentary practices, however many and heterogeneous those practices may have been.6
Just as it reduces documentary media to an easily consumable product—a product subject to the exigencies of commercial distribution—Netflix also squeezes global diversity into neatly wrapped packages. There is a correlation here between predictability of experience and standardization of form: the latter provides a reliable container to the former. The documentaries, in other words, render conveniently digestible what might otherwise appear foreign or unusual.
The rationale replicates the logic of tourism, according to which difference and alterity must also be turned into consumer items. Tourism favors the picturesque over the mundane, the exotic over the ordinary—all from the safety of a preplanned, relatively predictable ritual. “The tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to the familiar place.”7 Tourism can also reproduce existing forms of privilege and social hierarchies, both within a particular society and across national borders. The rich are more likely to travel than the poor; the global North is more likely to cast its tourist gaze on the global South than the other way around. Given the intimate relationship between tourism and photographic media, these disparities can easily be extended to the ways the world is pictured by leisure travelers and reproduced by various tourism industries.
The global Netflix documentary evokes the casual curiosity of a tourist while promising a safe “return” to a familiar place. The sights and experiences on the screen give the impression of a heterogenous and variegated geography, of different social realities and culturally distinct situations. Yet it all ends up being diluted by Netflix’s entertainment brand and its predictable and ultimately ethnocentric perspective on the world—the safe return to a familiar place—which not coincidently uphold traditional hierarchies between North and South, “center” and “periphery,” the documentary makers and their subjects. That this return to a familiar place is a deliberate gesture—a strategic move within the culture of Netflix—became apparent in the company’s 2020 “One Story Away” promotional video, which was part of a large global advertising campaign. Just under two minutes long, the video is essentially a collage of images from Netflix’s films and programs (mainly fictional), stitched together by a voice-over narration that addresses the viewer as a close interlocutor. (Ava DuVernay does the voice-over narration in the American version of the video.) “There’s a lot you may not know,” the narrator reminds us. “But that’s exactly what makes a story worth watching. Because in the end, we’re only one story away.” In the vast world of Netflix, we learn from the video, there is no risk of getting lost, as long as one sticks to the company’s narrative-oriented, formulaic type of entertainment, of which documentaries are an integral part.8
A long list of cultural references renders the documentaries’ global imagery reassuringly familiar, occasionally aligning colonial history and consumer culture. Oftentimes the global Netflix documentary recalls what Martin Roberts refers to as “coffee-table globalism,” a term he applies to late twentieth-century films such as Powaqqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio, 1988) and Baraka (dir. Ron Fricke, 1992) but which may also describe older cultural developments, “extending from the founding of the National Geographic Society in 1888, through Edward Steichen’s Family of Man photography exhibition and book of the 1950s, to the contemporary global mythologies of the Discovery Channel.”9 (Of these, the Discovery Channel turns out to be a particularly useful reference, as I discuss below.) Underlying each of these developments—and connecting them all—is a “Eurocentric mythology of the world” conveniently wrapped in a self-serving liberal humanism that glosses over deep global divides.10 This form of globalism subsumes cultural and racial differences under a vague, albeit fitting, notion of shared humanity—a gesture that ultimately does little to confront social disparities or dismantle cultural hierarchies.
The global Netflix documentary updates to the age of streaming this supercilious attitude toward cultural differences. However, the self-serving humanism that Roberts sees in the “coffee-table globalism” of yesteryear seems less credible now, or less earnest than it once was. In its place stands a different kind of common denominator, less an abstract ideal of humanity than a media connector that promotes its own brand of globalism, namely, Netflix itself.
Consider a documentary like Tales by Light (2015), a multi-episode project shot on every continent, with a particular emphasis on locations in the global South. Directed by the Australian cinematographer Abraham Joffe and produced by Canon Australia, the series scans the world for picturesque sites, non-Western peoples, adventure, and wildlife.11 Apart from a condescending admiration for non-Western cultures and a ready-to-wear reverence for the natural environment, there is little that connects one episode to another. Each one looks at different subjects and explores new locations. What really keeps the series together, what gives coherence to the project, is a narrative gimmick. The episodes follow one or more Western photographers (mostly White photographers) in their journeys of discovery, a trope reminiscent of colonial cultural imageries—and colonial travel writing in particular. In season 2, for example, we follow two renowned wildlife photographers based in Kenya, watch their interactions with a group of Maasai people, and witness their encounters with “big cats.” We also see an underwater photographer as he travels to western Brazil in search of a green anaconda, the heaviest snake on the planet, then heads north to the Caribbean, where he dives among sharks. Lastly, we watch a war photographer as he sets out searching for “dignified” forms of death, a project that takes him to India and Namibia. The series has more to show, but this cursory description should suffice to evoke a familiar West-centered representational tradition.12 Tales by Light aligns the perspectives of the photographers featured in the project with the worldview offered by the documentary series, which in turn represents the kind of globalism embodied by the Netflix brand.
One obvious charge against Tales by Light is that it renders interchangeable the various locations featured in the project, reducing the presumed diversity of the world to a condescending fascination with the natural, “the primitive.” The actual places and experiences documented matter less than the gaze cast on them. Outdated as it seems, this attitude vis-à-vis global diversity gains new relevance in the context of today’s streaming media services, where interchangeability of location becomes an asset well suited to the exigencies of a global video-on-demand platform. More than representing a backward-looking cultural practice, the presumption of interchangeability serves a particular regime of media circulation. It fulfills the expectation that any experience may be turned into a consumer item, regardless of its specific character or provenance. If Tales by Light befits a platform like Netflix, it is precisely because it conflates global diversity and consumer choice, rendering virtually irrelevant the gap between the actual experiences and their availability on the website. Diversity becomes inseparable from diversion, the dominant idiom on the platform.13
In this, too, Netflix gestures toward an earlier era, revisiting and updating significant media developments of the late twentieth century. This time, instead of looking at the outdated Cold War-era globalism of the “Family of Man” tradition, what we watch is a successful neoliberal alliance between documentary and entertainment culture.
This interest in exploiting the entertainment value of nonfiction media precedes the advent of Netflix’s streaming service by at least a couple of decades. Two developments in particular deserve attention here. The first comes from the history of documentary proper, more specifically the history of TV documentary in the United States; the other involves the refashioning of factual media into a lucrative form of entertainment. The last decades of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in documentary within commercial television, thanks in part to the expansion of the cable TV industry in the United States. Although theatrical documentary also showed clear commercial aspirations at the turn of the century, reaching unprecedented box office success in the United States in the early 2000s, the history of television offers an earlier and, in some ways, closer precedent to the popularization of documentary media on Netflix, an American company with global ambitions whose investment in the genre suggestively recalls the success of the Discovery Channel a few decades earlier.14 The second development I discuss here is the expansion of factual entertainment on television at the end of the twentieth century, the clearest example of which may be found in reality television. Both developments contributed to a rapidly changing television landscape—in the United States and beyond. And each provides a path to understanding Netflix’s approach to documentary media as a form of diversion that befits the company’s packaging of consumer-friendly globalism.
This history matters for a couple of reasons. First, it shows that Netflix’s emphasis on documentary as a form of diversion constitutes, in part, an extension of existing trends in the American television industry, the impact of which was not confined to US markets. Additionally, the reference to factual entertainment situates the Netflix documentary within a narrative that exceeds the history of documentary per se, one in which the notion of factuality became far more pliable than it had been for most of the twentieth century.
What happened to American television documentary in the 1980s is part of the broader history of postnetwork TV in the United States. The growth of cable television at the time allowed programmers to address distinct demographics and attend to niche TV markets, a feature that differentiated the commercial appeal of cable TV from the targeting of mass audiences that characterized the network era. On the one hand, the vastly increased number of channels available resulted in larger diversity of programs, which at times also translated into diversity of social representation; on the other hand, targeting dispersed yet specific audiences became a common industry practice in the cable era. Documentary might have looked like a weak contender in this new television environment, considering its declining importance for American television during the previous decades.15 Yet, as it turned out, cable revitalized the relationship between commercial television and documentary, although not without redefining some of the expectations attached to the latter. Documentary took on a new importance on American TV, and entertainment value, once a contentious issue between journalists and TV producers, became a pivotal element in this resurgence of television documentary.16
No media company represented this renewed interest in documentary like the Discovery Channel. As Cynthia Chris writes, Discovery “[devoted] virtually all of its programming to a genre that had nearly disappeared from for-profit television: the documentary.”17 Starting modestly in 1985, by the turn of the century Discovery “had become the cornerstone of a media conglomerate in control of four basic cable networks.”18 The emphasis on nonfiction might have sufficed to explain the connection between the Netflix documentary and American cable television from the 1980s. But there are more specific parallels that deserve attention too.
Discovery was a global media company with a recognizable brand. As Chris notes, both its global ambitions and the emphasis on branding contributed decisively to the company’s successful expansion.19 Still other parallels become apparent if we look at the types of documentary associated with the Discovery brand: travel and exploration, history and nature films, to name a few obvious genres that would be favored by Netflix years later. Perhaps most significantly, much like Netflix, Discovery incorporated entertainment value into its brand, thus reviving an interest in narrative conventions that had surfaced in American television documentary a few decades earlier.20 Besides obvious parallels in aesthetics, genre conventions, and subject matter, Discovery’s approach to documentary thus foreshadows Netflix’s own refashioning of nonfiction media into a commercial product. More than simply expand the category of documentary media, what both Discovery and Netflix proposed was a transformation of it, a change in institutional practice that brought documentary making ever closer to media genres that have historically stood apart from it.
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