Love documentaries but bristle at their long lead time? Well, first of all, it’s kind of weird how granular you are with your entertainment content, but second, Netflix has the series for you.
Instadocs is a new, appropriately titled “expedited documentary series” from executive producers Josh Tyrangiel (Vice News Tonight), Connor Schell (30 for 30) and showrunner Steve Yaccino (Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?). The whole idea here is to deliver high-quality documentary programming, but to do so at a pace that guarantees the subject matter still matters to consumers. To some degree, the Instadocs concept already exists as what previous generations referred to as “the news.” But Tyrangiel, whose entire career has been news media, says that is not really the right comparison.
Instadocs premieres on Saturday, May 30, with Alex Murdaugh, Unconvicted. Three years ago, former lawyer Alex Murdaugh was found guilty of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul. But that was all covered in Netflix’s other Murdaugh docuseries, Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal (2023). (It was also the subject of Hulu’s scripted series Murdaugh: Death in the Family.
Murdaugh’s team — the not-disbarred attorneys at the defendant’s table — appealed, claiming that Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill had interfered with the jury. Weeks ago, the bad guys won, and Murdaugh has been granted a new trial. Alex Murdaugh, Unconvicted features interviews with South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson, the creators of Trial Watchers, and jurors, including Myra Crosby, whose dismissal from the box contributed to questions about Hill’s misconduct.
Read The Hollywood Reporter‘s Q&A with Tyrangiel below.
I kind of already know the answer to this question — or at least some of it — because it’s literally in the series title, but what differentiates Instadocs from other documentary programming?
I think that there’s a lot of stuff out there in the marketplace that people move very quickly and get something up as quickly as they possibly can, and a lot of times it’s not terribly artful, and it doesn’t move the story forward, but it is a response to a need, right? Netflix has a bar for quality that we’re just not going to go under, right? So, that has sometimes inhibited our ability to respond to [news]. In this instance, what we’ve really created is a unit that’s very dedicated — and the series is very dedicated — to hitting the intersection between urgency and finesse. We don’t want to compromise on quality, beauty, facts, and getting to the center of a story. At the same time, we want to be able to deliver it to members at the peak of their interest in the story, and so that requires constructing a very specific kind of team with a very particular set of skills who know how to move swiftly, deploy the techniques of documentary, but not take the time that most documentaries take to make.
Do you see Instadocs as not just a new documentary series, but also a new kind of documentary series? A repeatable subset of the genre of documentary programming, so to speak.
It’s hard for me to speak to how to categorize it. What’d I’d say is, I know what we’re out there to do, which is to actually get people to the center of the story. And that means doing lots and lots of original shooting with the people at the center of these important events. Our appetite is pretty wide, so it can be current events, cultural moments, or crises. We just need to move at the speed of the story and really try and arrive at our timing so that we’re at this sort of apex of the conversation. We know that we can deliver this kind of storytelling across a wide variety of subjects, and it’s really now about sticking to our guts, and that means we are going to be in these places. We are not structuring everything from clips. We’re not relying on other people’s footage. We believe people cherish taste and a beautiful kind of documentary sensibility that can go along with these stories.
Using less archival footage will save digging time, but what other practical shortcuts do you plan to use for the sake of speed?
One thing is that you hire people for whom speed is a skill, right? Part of what we talked about from the beginning with Netflix and with (producer) Words + Pictures is, like, the greatest efficiency in making a film is decisiveness. If you set out what you’re here to do, and then you execute on that in the edit, and you put in lots and lots of time, you have people who are inexhaustible, you can get there. Part of what we did in hiring our team, is these are all people who have worked under very challenging conditions, who know how to execute at speed. This is not a gig for everybody. This is a kind of Navy SEAL doc gig. And so we hired very well, knowing full well that the temperament of the team is incredibly important. We’re not here to ruminate on tiny shot choices. If we’ve got the goods, we’ve got them. And again, if you put yourself at that intersection of urgency and finesse, that’s what we’re trying to nail.
Are there actual production sacrifices you have to make?
It’s a great question. When you’re trying to turn things out this fast, really, there’s only two choices: One is that you keep your regular working hours and sacrifice some steps — we are sacrificing no steps. We’re not sacrificing fact-checking, color or a mix. We have original composed music. And so the only way to do it is to sacrifice sleep. It is working as many of the 24 hours in a day as possible to get this done. But there are no corners being cut. We don’t want to sacrifice quality at all, because we think audiences really want to see the very best when they want to see it, and that’s what we’re going to do.
What is your turnaround time?
So on [Murdaugh], we kicked off production on May 18, and the first installment of the series hits the service on May 30.
We’re speaking on May 27 — I don’t yet have a screener. Is the episode done?
I can tell you it is pretty much done because I can be on this phone call.
One thing that has been so great about the project is that everybody understands we’re going to move at the speed of the story responsibly, right? Some may take less time, some may take a little bit more time, but what we really want to do is make sure that we get all of the things that are most important, which is nailing the story, nailing the accuracy and the context, and still hitting that window when people are like, “Wait, what happened?” And then delivering something that’s really good.
Why should one not think of Instadocs as a weekly newsmagazine show, like a 60 Minutes or a Dateline, which have been around forever?
So, one thing we don’t have: correspondents. We don’t have anchors. We reserve the right to drop voiceover down the road if we want, but right now we don’t. And some of that is because we don’t think we need it. With much respect to news divisions, they are larger and they have an obligation to cover pretty much everything, right? That’s not us. There’s certain stories that are just not going to work for Instadocs, and there are others where we will absolutely be all over it. But I think news is the wrong comparison.
Will Instadocs continue to report on a developing topic like the Murdaugh case?
We reserve the right to do whatever is necessary to satisfy the audience. What I would say is, it’s not a true crime series, and as soon as everybody gets a couple of days’ sleep and gets properly hydrated, we will be waiting for the next current event that is so urgent and so interesting that we have to deploy. It could be across a wide variety of things — our antennas are up. We’re going to learn from each episode and installment that we do, like, “OK, what do we like and what are we good at? What is this format really, really strong on?” So yeah, could we go back? Maybe. But we’re just scanning.
What is the rollout plan? Weekly? Every other?
Installments are TBD.
What about the episode order size?
We’ll stay ever-ready, ever-vigilant — but the number…all that stuff is TBD. We don’t want to be in people’s faces when it’s not required. You can exhaust audiences. Our goal is to really be there when the need is there.
If it’s an all-hands mad dash when you have a topic, but you won’t always have one or a deadline, what is production like in a slow news cycle?
I would say that, like a good firehouse, there’ll be some times when we’re working on fire prevention, and we’re looking ahead and seeing, “Well, is this thing brewing? What would we need to do to plan for it?” A lot of this is preparation. At the same time, when the bell rings, everybody moves. We were up and running when we got the call, and everybody responded, everybody pitched in. It was great to see.
Do you have a second episode subject yet?
I don’t. We’re monitoring lots of stuff, and then we will sit back and determine when the right time to go is, and then we’ll go. But I’m very comfortable with both having too many stories and not enough, because this world always provides.
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