REVELATORY DOCUSERIES: LEAVING NEVERLAND, HBO
Dan Reed’s two-part documentary, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival before airing on HBO, is hard to watch, and that’s the point. It’s wrenching, as a viewer, to hear two adult men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, reckon with the child sexual abuse that has colored their lives, and wrestle decades later with feelings of guilt, trauma, and self-loathing. It’s shocking to see precisely how, for Michael Jackson, the man they accuse of abusing them (and whose estate is suing HBO), the machinery of fandom seemed to double as insulation. And it’s startling to remember that, because of the power and joy of the art Jackson made, so few people cared to look behind it.
Also noteworthy: Surviving R. Kelly (Lifetime)
STRUCTURAL EXPERIMENTATION: RUSSIAN DOLL, NETFLIX
The multitudes Russian Doll contains can be interpreted to fit any particular person’s life experiences. Is this a show about cycles of addiction? Sure. About the building blocks of video-game narratives? Definitely. About constructing a way to get past destructive childhood trauma? Absolutely. Anchored by an undeniably captivating Natasha Lyonne in the role of Nadia, a woman who keeps finding herself dying and returning to the same moment during her 36th birthday party, the Netflix series has endless layers and offshoots, but all of them return to the central point that existence is worth the price of pain, and that simple connection, above all, can be a truly saving grace. Also noteworthy: State of the Union (SundanceTV)
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