I am watching “This is a Robbery...”, like many, I always like a good (sometimes even a not so good) art heist story.
The story here is interesting, but there are elements of the documentary style that I dislike (musical and sound effects, and some visual effects, added to create cheap drama). But what is really interesting to me is how this relates to the state of TV (especially cable and streaming) documentaries. After the shit show that was ‘Allen v Farrow’, I did some reading and found that there is a general sense that the skyrocketing popularity of documentaries on places like Netflix and HBO has been accompanied by a plummet in credibility and journalistic integrity. That helped me place the Allen project in a better context: more infotainment than actual news documentary. It does seem that someone, perhaps news divisions at the TV networks, or outside sources like Columbia School or Journalism, needs to define a sub genre of news documentary, and establish criteria and best practice guidelines. Then we could have like entertainment documentaries, that would perhaps contain a disclaimer of something like “inspired by real events”, and news documentaries, that would indicate it was produced based on accepted journalistic standards. I’m only halfway through “This is a Robbery”, and so far think it is not as entertaining as a Ian Pears novel, and about as credible as a documentary on the History channel. On Mon, 12 Apr 2021 at 7:16 AM Mark Jeffries <[email protected]> wrote: For the Sunday after Easter: (Snip) > > 2. THIS IS A ROBBERY: THE WORLD'S BIGGEST ART HEIST--The Netflix > original true crime docu-mini about the 1990 theft from the Gardner Museum > in Boston of $500M of art works dropped Apr. 7 and has an 88% RT > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CAKGtkYKUdHTias49H%3D1YLLYdBZnYTnGHEWB5urZmcwLcBofNTA%40mail.gmail.com.
