The 20 best TV documentaries – ranked
Drama is sexier, comedy more quotable, current affairs more immediate, but the very finest documentaries sit unquestionably among the most important television ever made. True stories sometimes told straight, at other times tweaked, subverted or filtered through a new lens to offer a fresh perspective. Frequently changing the way television was made, they have covered a limitless array of subjects from warfare to the arts, celebrity to politics, but their most powerful moments often focus on the simple stuff of everyday life. Picking 20 of them has been a process so nightmarish and bewildering that even Ken Burns would struggle to construct a coherent narrative out of it, so a few ground rules were required.
All the selections had to be widely available. For legendary, long-running strands such as Storyville, Arena or Omnibus, we have cherrypicked a documentary which, while outstanding in its own right, best represents that series’ overarching vision in its diversity and ambition. We have also tried to avoid documentaries which received a wide cinematic release, and restricted each filmmaker (or presenter) to a single entry, although David Attenborough fans will spot his fingerprints on several of our choices, either as presenter or commissioner.
Not all of these documentaries changed the world. All of them will change the way you see it.
20. The Vietnam War (2017)
For so long, the personification of diligent, encyclopaedic and occasionally staid narrative history, Ken Burns – whose subjects have spanned jazz and the Brooklyn Bridge, Prohibition and Ernest Hemingway – here settled on a pivotal passage in American history which lent itself to a more dynamic, occasionally cacophonous treatment than usual. With so much vivid film available, the so-called “Ken Burns effect” – whereby a simultaneous zoom and pan create a sense of movement in a still photo – received fewer outings, but Burns’s instincts for even-handedness and objectivity remained intact: from more than 100 witnesses, Vietnamese veterans and citizens are rightly given a generous hearing in a damning assessment of American imperialism.
Watch it on: Now TV
19. Around the World in 80 Days with Michael Palin (1989)
He may be the nicest man in television, but we may also have Michael Palin to thank for the glut of celebrity travelogues that followed one of his first forays into television globetrotting back in 1989, none of them coming close to the wit and insight of this adventure. Still, it could have been worse: among the BBC’s preferred options for host was Noel Edmonds. Instead, we got nourishing evidence that more unites us than divides us, all irresistibly framed by the derring-do of reprising Phileas Fogg’s titular challenge. The former Python, meanwhile, got himself a whole new career which endures to this day – this year, he was in Nigeria.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
18. The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991)
Best known for his impressive if problematic films on Biggie and Tupac, Cobain and Love, and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, this serio-comic survey of now largely-forgotten South African white supremacist Eugène Terre’Blanche is Nick Broomfield’s masterpiece. In an age when the Far Right is on the rise around the world, Broomfield’s pitiless mockery of fascism might retrospectively feel like shooting fish in a barrel with a peashooter, but proves brutally effective here. Through his subversive and entirely deliberate ineptitude, Broomfield exposes Terre’Blanche’s empty bluster, extracting unwitting confessions and, through his devoted driver JP, demonstrating the human cost of demagoguery.
Watch it on: Channel 4 online
17. The Lie of the Land (2007)
Forget Clarkson’s Farm: Molly Dineen’s feature-length lament for the state of British agriculture remains alarmingly relevant today, as farmers struggle to reconcile careless, often contradictory government legislation with the additional impact of Brexit. Following three agricultural workers who revealed the stark realities behind the bucolic myths of countryside life, it undoubtedly played a part in the growing conversation over sustainable, welfare-focused food production. Seventeen years on, as we consider how to square environmental and biocentric concerns with growing demands from supermarkets and consumers for cheaper food amid a cost-of-living crisis, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Watch it on: Amazon Prime Video
16. The Jinx (2015)
Some years after French series The Staircase (available now on Netflix) blazed a trail in televised true crime but just before Making a Murderer took the genre mainstream and tabloid came HBO’s 2015 miniseries The Jinx. Directed by Andrew Jarecki (also responsible for the extraordinary feature Capturing the Friedmans), it addressed an unsolved disappearance and two unsolved murders, all connected by the real-estate mogul Robert Durst. Built around claustrophobic, engrossing verbal duels between probing director and evasive subject, its mastery of narrative climaxes in a final twist unforeseen by anyone, and which led directly to Durst’s trial as documented in this year’s sequel.
Watch it on: Now TV
15. Arena: The Burger and the King (1996)
These days, Arena (1975-present) seems to have settled on slightly skewed celebrity profiles, but in its Anthony Wall-produced pomp the BBC series would explore everything from Peter Blake’s obsession with wrestling and the history of the Chelsea Hotel to this deep-fried gem reassessing Elvis Presley through his diet. From squirrels and racoons back home in Tupelo to the grotesque artery-hardeners of the Vegas years, the devil is not so much in disguise as in the detail, flashing up recipes onscreen (although don’t try these at home) and wrangling enlightening new perspectives on its exhaustively scrutinised subject.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
14. Once Upon a Time in Iraq (2020)
Keeping it simple doesn’t mean reining in ambition: James Bluemel’s devastating five-part series was built upon on-camera interviews with those who lived through the invasion/liberation of Iraq and its chaotic aftermath of insurgency and abandonment. By contrast, politicians and commanders only pop up in archive footage, their hyperbole brutally undermined by the passing years. From professors and translators to soldiers and punk rockers, some are initially hostile, others overwhelmingly relieved. All, by the end, are utterly disillusioned. From the personal, the political and universal emerge, free of soundbites and freighted with truth. Bluemel has since adopted a similar approach to Northern Ireland and Covid, with equally rewarding results.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
13. Civilisation (1969)
Commissioned by David Attenborough to showcase BBC Two and colour television, Kenneth Clark’s 13-part epic was hugely ambitious and unapologetically intellectual. It was also unarguably elitist, Eurocentric and patrician: dated in some respects, certainly, but Civilisation also revolutionised the arts on television and refuted the supposed danger of underestimating your audience. Some of the filming was almost as beautiful as the art it celebrated, and Clark’s chronological approach moored his carefully articulated arguments in accessible fashion. Civilisations, a 2018 sequel, featuring nine episodes presented variously by Simon Schama, David Olusoga and Mary Beard, broadened the palette appreciably and necessarily.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
12. Cracked Actor (1975)
The South Bank Show and Imagine have certainly had their moments, but Omnibus’s (1967-2003) Cracked Actor is the archetypal profile of the eccentric artist. Alan Yentob (who has spent the rest of his onscreen career striving in vain to bottle the same magic) hangs out with David Bowie in Thin White Duke mode, rampant creativity visibly fuelled by cocaine as the Diamond Dogs tour crossed America. Seldom had a star looked so remote from reality; it is no coincidence that watching the gaunt, damaged Bowie being driven around the parched Californian landscapes inspired Nic Roeg to cast him as a licentious alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Watch it on: YouTube
11. Storyville: The Day I Will Never Forget (2002)
The BBC’s global documentary strand began in 1997 with Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly and has continued to mix established smashes with discerning revivals for feature documentaries too niche or problematic for widespread cinematic release. While the influence of, say, Grey Gardens or Navalny endures, Kim Longinotto’s The Day I Will Never Forget is perhaps Storyville’s acme: an unflinching, sensitive, nuanced examination, presented without judgement, of female genital mutilation in Kenya’s Somali communities, and the cultural and legal pushback against it. Distressing, touching and complex, it achieves what all the best Storyvilles aspire to: tell stories we didn’t know we needed to hear.
Watch it on: Channel 4 online
10. Louis Theroux: Savile (2016)
This self-reflexive feature brought Theroux’s second incarnation – the serious journalist conducting deep dives into social issues – into conflict with his first (the faux-naif curator of eccentric outsiders and cult celebrities). In 2000’s When Louis Met… Jimmy, the Michael Moore protegé dug below Jimmy Savile’s weird persona although not, as subsequent events proved, diligently enough. In Savile, he asks whether he could have exposed Savile’s prolific criminality, but this is no self-indulgent mea culpa; Theroux gives voice to victims and discreetly condemns the culture that enabled Savile for so long. Theroux’s first steps in production – notably the superb Gods of Snooker – augur well for a new chapter in a fascinating career.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
9. O.J.: Made in America (2016)
Nothing less than a history of black America in the second half of the twentieth century, Ezra Edelman’s ESPN epic (shown here in episodic form on the BBC under the Storyville banner) may have won an Oscar, but we’re including it as, at eight hours long, it is clearly better suited to the small screen. The double murder that came to define Simpson inevitably casts a long shadow. Even more valuable, though, is the strange rise of the legendary NFL running back who, in parallel to the ongoing Civil Rights struggle, transcends his humble origins but sells his soul in the process.
Watch it on: Disney+
8. The Beatles: Get Back (2021)
The narrative around the sessions for Let It Be – reinforced by 1995’s comprehensive, excellent Beatles Anthology – was that the Fab Four were by this stage barely functioning, riven by suspicion and resentment over new partners, financial shenanigans and creative differences. Not so, counters Peter Jackson’s magnificent labour of love. While hardly sugar-coating the tensions, the restored and artfully edited footage as they prepared for an ambitious concert performance balances a joyful sense of alchemical genius at work (Paul conjuring the title track out of the ether) with the quotidian (John orders a “dry bun”; Ringo owns up to a fart) to startling, illuminating effect.
Watch it on: Disney+
7. The Ascent of Man (1973)
Coming four years after Civilisation, to which it is a scientific and philosophical sibling, Jacob Bronowski’s 13-part series had if anything a tougher brief. Whereas Kenneth Clark could lean on the world’s finest art, Bronowski needed to find the visual and aural poetry in science – something he made look disarmingly easy as he talked us through millennia of human thought. Lucid, detailed, sober and joyous in turn, it personifies the Reithian maxim by making sense of difficult ideas for a mass audience. The sequence in Auschwitz, where several of Bronowski’s relatives were murdered, makes the case for accountability in science which rings ever louder today.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
6. The War Game (1966)
Suppressed for almost 20 years after the BBC (under governmental pressure) declared The War Game “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”, Peter Watkins’s film finally aired in 1985. With nuclear dread at its peak, it proved more potent than ever – even if the disgusted Watkins himself had long ago emigrated. Blurring the line between documentary and drama, it imagines the likely impact of nuclear warfare in, yes, horrifying detail, with vox pops, reportage images and stentorian voiceover (plus added Michael Aspel) only adding to the authenticity. Watkins’s earlier film Culloden was an equally arresting challenge to convention, using verité techniques to reconstruct the infamous eighteenth-century atrocity.
Watch it on: DVD/Blu-Ray
5. The Power of Nightmares (2004)
Before he tipped into self-parody, Adam Curtis’s signature style of thorough research (he is given the run of the BBC archives and boy, does he make the most of it), playful pairing of sight and sound and calmly articulated arguments about “hidden truths” reached its apogee with this bold and persuasive three-part mood piece positing the mutually dependent relationship between American neoconservatism and global Islamism as aggression and paranoia spiralled in the real world. Some of Curtis’s wilder leaps down rabbit holes stir suspicions of style over content, but the impressionistic, semi-hallucinatory iconoclasm comprise the most dazzling of trips to this day.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
4. The Death of Yugoslavia (1995)
From Clinton to Putin, there are few world leaders who won’t pick up when television producer Norma Percy calls. Her reputation for comprehensive assessments of major global flashpoints was made with this tour de force of “immediate history”. Directed by Angus Macqueen, The Death of Yugoslavia brought together major participants from all sides (there is a genuine frisson to seeing Slobodan Milo?ević attempting to justify genocide) to consider the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, in the process making some sense of a complex, intractable tragedy. She would later tackle the Gaza crisis, Northern Ireland, Cuba and the rise of Putin with the same steady, incisive gaze.
Watch it on: YouTube
3. The World at War (1973)
Masterminded by Jeremy Isaacs, narrated by Laurence Olivier and scored by Carl Davis, this fallback for many a GCSE History teacher on a Friday afternoon has lost none of its authority or power, even as trends in television and historiography have come and gone. Over 26 episodes, it set the standard for historical documentary-making with its meticulous research and seamless marriage of evocative archive with a broad array of interviewees including Lord Mountbatten, Albert Speer and James Stewart. Genocide, the episode on the Holocaust, was shown on ITV without ad breaks.
Watch it on: DVD/Blu-Ray
2. Life on Earth (1979)
David Attenborough’s first blockbuster survey represents his first step in what has become an inadvertent and profoundly influential lifelong mission to reframe how we see, hear and think about the natural world. And while successive series from Attenborough and the BBC’s Natural History Unit, all the way through to last year’s Planet Earth III, have exploited to thrilling effect the latest filming technology, Life on Earth retains its wow factor through both its breadth and intimacy. Viewers had never seen anything like this before, and Attenborough’s close encounter with Rwandan gorillas remains an intensely expressive and jaw-droppingly exciting union of intention and execution.
Watch it on: BBC iPlayer
1. The Up Series (1964-2019)
While many key episodes of the great current-affairs series – Dispatches, Panorama, This Week – are hard to find these days, World in Action long ago ensured immortality with this, a one-off curio which evolved over the years into an unassailable argument for television’s enduring cultural importance. Beginning in 1964 with a series of frank interviews with a shallow cross-section of 14 guileless seven-year-olds (largely white and male) – cheeky Tony, solemn Bruce, vulnerable Neil – Michael Apted returned to them every seven years and, in the process, wove a moving, profound and revealing tapestry of Britain through the decades. Apted’s willingness to be critiqued adds a valuable new layer of value and interest, although his passing in 2021 means we may never get the perfect coda of 70 Up; two of the participants have also died. His legacy, however, will never be matched.
Watch it on: ITVX
