Ten Excellent Documentaries You Absolutely Need to Watch Now
There’s more than just National Geographic shows out there
When most people hear the word “documentary,” something very specific comes to mind. Depending on your age, it might be the terrible documentaries you saw in school in the 1960s and 1970s, or Jacques Cousteau and his adventures on the Calypso, or more recently the David Attenborough Planet Earth series. For nearly everyone the word will conjure the image of a lion creeping silently across the African savanna, stealthily stalking a gazelle for dinner.
All of these are indeed documentaries, but they barely scratch the surface of an art form that, after all, has its own category at the Academy Awards. In fact, they show up in two categories: Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary (Short Subject). Those are typically awarded off-air and even if they have a famous narrator (like Tom Hanks, for example), you won’t see them covered on Entertainment Tonight. That’s a shame, because many of them are light years better than the latest episode of The Voice or The Bachelor.
With all the streaming services available today, the number of documentaries to choose from is almost overwhelming, covering every possible subject. The most common, at the moment at least, are in the areas of true crime and…
