2024 Favorite Things: Documentaries
My top choices are in bold.
Documentaries:
If you’ve followed me on Instagram, it won’t come as a surprise to you that my favorite documentary is the miniseries on Dr. Ann Wolpert Burgess. Coming in second for the compassion and human-animal bond is Billy & Molly: an Otter Love Story. You can watch Billy & Molly on YouTube for free.
| Title | Key People | Platform | Notes |
| Death in the Dorms | Hulu | only S2 is listed; docuseries, true crime, episodic | |
| The Program | Katherine Kubler | Netflix | 3 part documentary by a survivor of a “boarding school” that treated children like prisoners of war and never had a real edu component. Now adults, the survivors took as many of the files as possible including security footage. This was like if the Stanford Experiment was done for real for many years in different cities around the world. Even after 2008 Congressional hearings, every time one facility closes another opens up sometimes at the same place with a different LLC name. They contributed a lot of the Romneys and Ann R supported them. |
| Homicide New York | Dick Wolf | Netflix | 4 true crime episodes about Manhattan North and South cases |
| Quiet on the Set: the Dark Side of Kids TV | Drake Bell | ID | the horrors at Nickelodeon harboring sexual abusers |
| What Jennifer Did | Jennifer Pan | Netflix | documentary about an Ontario home invasion case with a twist |
| lover, stalker, killer | Dave Kroupa, Nancy Raney | Netflix | wild documentary out of Nebraska about jealousy turning into murder |
| The Perfect Wife | Keith Papini | Hulu | The disappearance of Sherri Papini. Directed by Michael Beach Nichols – camera spinning and upside-down shots are obviously meant to signify chaos but it’s annoying. |
| Dancing with the Devil | The Wilkings family | Netflix | never heard such of thing as dance cults, but this mash-up (evil genius) of a “production company” owned by a pastor shows how manipulative the real evil people are with their capitalist motivations hiding behind Bible Study. |
| SharkFest Shark Beach with Anthony Mackie | Anthony Mackie, Jasmin Graham (marine biologist) | NatGeoTV | One of the best episodes of SharkFest to date. Anthony Mackie tours his hometown New Orleans waters like Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico to see the impact of shark depredation for fishermen; then he goes to Florida and sees a variety of sharks. It was wonderful to finally a diverse group of people. In 2023, they had another Avenger, Chris Hemsworth in his home of Australia and how sharks were part of the surfing life. It was definitely noticed that the scientists included a WoC this time. |
| SharkFest Shark vs Ross Edgley | Ross Edgley | NatGeoTV | a silly set of 4 challenges where competitive athlete and world-record holder Ross Edgley measures his performance against 4 types of sharks in actions like swimming speed, breaching the water, and even caloric intake. I’ll give it credit for showing trivia about sharks in a strange way. |
| SharkFest Shark Attacks 360 | NatGeoTV | The full CGI / holodeck type of the room the host presents in, and the “virtual assistant” CORAL (I guess like Iron Man’s Jarvis or Star Trek’s talking Enterprise databank) are cheesy. I’m sure they would bring in young viewers though. The quality of the CGI is pretty good considering how bad it could be. You get to see specific sizes of these CGI sharks who are animated but can be non-thrashing comparisons next to a human. The screens that the host is looking at prove she must be good at acting as well because she’s probably looking at a green rectangle like weather reporters. This show has some diversity too – though mostly white people. They briefly include a couple of high school students are part of their teacher’s citizen science team; they actually get to conduct real tests and retrieve their listening station devices. | |
| SharkFest Baby Sharks in the City | NatGeoTV | This episode presented as if this team just discovered the Long Island great white shark nursery but it was news in 2016. | |
| Sharks Gone Viral | NatGeoTV | Comedians and scientists watch viral videos of sharks and then offer comments. actually pretty funny. | |
| Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story | Billy Mail, Susan Mail, and Molly the Otter | Hulu | Not a story about a pair of otters. A story about a depressed man who comes across an orphaned starving otter. They immediately form a strong bond. |
| SharkWeek: Sharks of the Dead Zone | Dr. Tiara Moore, Dr. Craig | Discovery | Trying to find if bull sharks can still use lagoons as nurseries when algal blooms are killing off everything else. |
| SharkWeek: Sharktopia | Discovery | a meaningful episode that focused on bringing the leopard shark back to a healthy population in Indonesia. some other less highlighted sharks were shown. | |
| SharkWeek: Mothersharker | Discovery | despite the B-movie title of this episode, it was fairly decent to see the variety of hammerhead sharks and their reproductive migration | |
| SharkWeek Great White Serial Killer | Discovery | A team found a way to help mollusk divers in a small Mexican village to protect themselves against Great White attacks. | |
| SharkWeek Belly of the Beast | Discovery | In NZ, team does an incredibly careless, stupid gimmick which they said they’ve used before with success: it’s a type of sub-cage shaped like a whale carcass waiting for sharks to attack them. And the plan is to update this cage, called EARL, to make it bitable & more enticing. The funny part is that a black woman came up with some of the upgrade ideas like blood blisters – and white women are the ones going into this thing. | |
| Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer | Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess and Steven Constantine | Hulu | Produced by Dakota & Elle Fanning (Cool!). The miniseries on Dr. Burgess is so good. It has basics she gives at her panels, but it has interviews with her family (all of them are doctors), assistant, other people who got to know her like the first woman in the Cosby case. It shows how all the men didn’t give her an ounce of credit in the FBI. She looked happy at the end that her goal wasn’t fame but to have the culture change. The title Mastermind feels specifically chosen to erase Mindhunter, the show based on John Douglas’ book and he was certainly one who avoided inviting her into any rooms. He disapproved of her being on the Menendez brothers’ defense team since she’s a leading expert in sexual trauma. |
Related 2024 Faves:
Books, Comics, Picture Books
TV
Movies
Podcasts/Vlogs
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.