Now that we’ve come to the end of 2024, looking back over my year in Netflix viewership I’m reminded of one of my favorite types of content I enjoyed from the streaming giant this year: Its top-tier documentaries and docuseries, titles which regularly deliver compelling stories spanning everything from history to crime, culture, and much more.
I probably watched somewhere on the order of two dozen this year, most of them being docuseries as opposed to feature-length documentary films. In no particular order, I’m going to walk through the five that I enjoyed the most below.
This first one was both a tear-jerker as well as one of the most feel-good Netflix release I’ve watched in years. From my previous coverage of the documentary: “Anyone who’s ever found solace in an online community will have no trouble at all putting themselves in the shoes of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man born in 1989 and the subject of the new Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.
“Ibelin is the name of the World of Warcraft character that Steen used for years to interact with fellow gamers, in a digital world where his disability — suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition that chipped away at his ability to move and breathe — didn’t matter. In real life, the disease that would eventually kill him at 25 left him isolated and immobile. But playing Warcraft allowed him to cheat the life that had cheated him; in the game world, he had a network of friends. He could flirt. He could display empathy and offer advice, at one point helping a mother and her son.”
After his death, Mats’ parents signed into the blog that he’d kept for years, thinking that they would announce the news to his followers. What they found blew them away — they quickly learned what a rich and fulfilling life he’d led online and were quickly inundated with messages from the friends he’d made.
Among Netflix’s other standout documentaries and docuseries from this year, this next release offers an insider look at one of the most iconic cheerleading squads in the US. Highlighting the rigorous training and personal sacrifices made by the young women who don a Dallas Cowboys cheerleading uniform, America’s Sweethearts is equal parts gritty and glamorous. The series, which is coming back for an additional season, takes viewers beyond the pom-poms and perfect smiles to delve into themes of empowerment and teamwork.
“The women are impressive when you see them all in a kick line — they’re in a row and they’re beautiful, athletic, and strong,” Whiteley, who also directed the Netflix docuseries Last Chance U and Cheer, said in an interview with the streamer. “They seem impenetrable. I think that is made even more impressive when you realize that there’s a living, breathing human being underneath that facade.
“Along the way, as a handful of these girls really began to open up about their lives to us, I just found them as an organization and as a group to be even more impressive. I think that became a visual metaphor for that journey that we went on with them.”
I have to confess something: Of all the Netflix documentaries on this list, this is the one that was the most shocking. I mean it. I probably spent 80% of this docuseries with my jaw hanging open in disbelief, flummoxed by the insanity of this story and the colorful characters.
From my previous coverage: “The Kings of Tupelo is built around something all-too-common in the small-town South — a feud, which eventually explodes into outright war.
“It sounds straightforward enough, but for the fact that this story’s grab bag of insanity also includes an internet conspiracy, black market body parts, an Elvis impersonator, and an assassination attempt on the President. Essentially, this is the story of how a loudmouth Elvis impersonator and janitor ended up accused of trying to poison the man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Oh, and I forgot to mention the best part — it’s from the studio behind Tiger King. Say no more, right?”
Skywalkers: A Love Story is a Netflix documentary follows two daredevils from Moscow who share a passion for climbing the tallest structures in the world. Their passion is presented as an expression of their love for each other, with their adventure also doubling as a kind of metaphor for love. At one point in the film, for example, we’re told that love is like heights. The fear of them both never goes away, “you just get better at facing it.”
The film is the result of more than 200 hours of material shot across seven years and six countries, and it includes first-person footage from many of the couple’s most daring and jaw-dropping climbs. Talk about taking that Defying Gravity song literally.
Of all the Netflix documentaries on this list, this final title is the timeliest and definitely the most urgent.
Across the nine episodes of Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, director Brian Knappenberger leads viewers through a history lesson that contextualizes modern Russia, Ukraine, and Putin — and starts off by revisiting the development of the atomic bomb, and how it shaped geopolitics across the decades that followed.
“While the Cold War ended in 1991,” Netflix’s promotional material for the Turning Point docuseries explains, “even a casual appraisal of current headlines reveals that relations between the United States and Russia — the one-time center of the Soviet Union — remain tense, to say the least. The global repercussions of the Cold War continue to ripple through the current geopolitical landscape to this day, but it can be difficult to understand just how a mid-20th century struggle for ideological dominance continues to ensnare countless nations in ongoing unrest.”
