A Starry but Superficial Netflix Doc

With Marshall Curry‘s The New Yorker at 100, a magazine famous for its erudition and curation receives a polished, amusing and generally superficial Reader’s Digest summary of a documentary.

Very little is wrong with the 96-minute version of The New Yorker‘s history that Curry (Street Fight) is recounting (premiering at Telluride ahead of an eventual Netflix launch) — other than the completely unavoidable awareness of all the pieces of the story that aren’t being told with desirable depth, or told at all.

When Tina Brown took over the magazine in 1992 as only its fourth editor-in-chief, there were fears from the outside that she would deliver a product that was glossier, more star-studded, but generally less substantive than what the magazine’s devoted readers were looking for. The New Yorker at 100 is a glossier, more star-studded, but generally less substantive documentary take than the magazine’s devoted readers probably crave.

My parents subscribed to The New Yorker throughout my childhood. I loved the cartoons and some of the snootier and more investigative content, but what I truly adored and what shaped me as a writer and thinker were Roger Angell’s musings on baseball and Pauline Kael’s film reviews. Kael is featured in the doc’s pre-credits prelude as if she’s going to play a major role in the documentary, but then she’s never mentioned again, while Angell is simply never mentioned. Can you tell the story of The New Yorker without Roger Angell? I suppose. Can you tell it without Pauline Kael? Not well.

But I’m guessing most New Yorker obsessives will feel similar gaps of their own, leading me to my bottom line: The New Yorker at 100 should have been a six-hour docuseries. The magazine and its occasionally complicated legacy deserve nothing less.

Curry’s approach to The New Yorker, tied to this spring’s 100th anniversary issue, is more like the sort of overly packaged tribute issues you might see at your grocery store checkout counter, bringing together a collection of pretty pictures and hastily reported pieces to honor a deceased movie star or a new Star Wars movie.

David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker editor since 1998, is the documentary’s amiable guide on what is a multi-tiered journey through the magazine’s past and present.

There’s the production of the 100th anniversary issue, which we witness from the earliest story pitches to design concept meetings to art pitches to different stages of the editing and production process.

This is an opportunity for Curry to give cursory capsule introductions to a number of current New Yorker heavyweights, including longtime art director Françoise Mouly, cartoon editor Emma Allen, fiction editor Deborah Treisman and veteran office manager Bruce Diones, key staff writers like Nick Paumgarten, Hilton Als and Rachel Syme, and head researcher Fergus McIntosh, current guardian of the “vaunted fact-checking department.”

Then there’s a by-the-numbers journey along that 100-year history, narrated by Julianne Moore. She steers us through capsule summaries of key New Yorker moments, including the publications of John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the rise and abrupt departure of the aforementioned Brown. It’s left for Moore to give damning statistics on the magazine’s exclusion of Black writers for most of its early history and then to highlight William Shawn’s recruitment of James Baldwin to write “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” which is treated here as a complete and total solution to a problem that was barely investigated.

Then there are lots of pretty and funny and pretty funny celebrities — Jon Hamm, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jesse Eisenberg and many more — sitting in an all-white room in a chair from the original New Yorker offices talking about how much they love The New Yorker, when they first became aware of The New Yorker and, in many cases, what it meant when their writing first appeared in The New Yorker.

The sheer number of times my notes on The New Yorker at 100 say, “That was fun, but tell me more” exceeds a dozen.

Hearing about the cartoon selection process, Allen’s strategy to sway Remnick’s selections and getting to see the person behind the name Roz Chast is fun! But tell me more!

Witnessing the rigor of the fact-checking process and getting a hint of the sort of people who would gravitate toward this demanding job is fun! But tell me more!

Seeing how some of the magazine’s staff writers have these wildly open-ended beats that allow them to wander the streets of Manhattan, regularly frequent fringe art shows or travel to foreign countries just to find a potential story is fun! But tell me more!

In my ideal world, the 100th anniversary issue and its production could have gotten a full hour. The magazine’s history of long-form journalism could have gotten an hour. The cartoons easily could have received an hour. The magazine’s evolution from a primarily male, entirely white thing to whatever its current staff looks like could have gotten an hour. Criticism, with a focus on Pauline Kael, could have gotten an hour. Covers, with more discussion of iconic avatar Eustace Tilley and several controversial issues, could have received an hour. I’m not sure everybody would have wanted an hour on fact-checking, but I would. All that and I still left out Roger Angell.

It’s like this: The New Yorker at 100 is a commercial for The New Yorker and it isn’t masquerading as anything else. But at that point, it should at least be a commercial for the magazine that befits the voice, aesthetic and ethos of the magazine in a meaningful way. This film’s approach would have been entertaining and justifiably pithy for more magazines than I can count. It just feels wrong for The New Yorker.