To be brisk, there are two categories of documentaries: the ones that are trying you make you think and the ones that are trying to make you believe. This is in the latter one, something that does not documents, but judges. China bad, U. S. good, follow the playbook, don't think too much, listen to the nicely made up (both meaning of the word) people that narrate whatever they want you to believe. I am a big fan of medical scientific documentaries, but I couldn't continue watching this. It felt like pure propaganda poured into my ears and eyes.
Imagine conversations you have with your friends and family over a few days or weeks. Then imagine that someone would pick and choose whatever anyone had said and string up as a representation of reality. Ridiculous, right? When you uncle says aliens destroyed the twin towers or whatever, you can leave the room, you can tell him he is wrong, you can laugh your heart out or maybe agree with his perspective. Not with this documentary, which takes individual opinions, fragments them into small pieces then strings them up in a pathetic joke of a narrative. This is bad because I recognized the pattern. This is the norm now, not the exception: montage beats narrative flow. There is no argument you can think about or proof you can analyze, just a vague idea repeated ad nauseam by fragments of talking heads, spouting platitudes nicely, slowly and facing the camera while the soundtrack tells you what you should feel about it.
Now, the apparent intent of the show is to explore how transformative the domain of public health has become and how it is not a matter of monopolist decision or of money or even governments, but of people coming together and doing a public service. Which is a beautiful fantasy. The very people interviewed are empowered bureaucrats that believe policy and laws have saved lives more than the individual people who risked their lives to determine what the problem is, then fight AGAINST the norms to implement a solution then even more to enforce it. In their attempt to empower the people who are on the invisible front line against disease, the one that people notice only when something goes wrong in their manufactured reality, the makers of the documentary have eroded the very thing that makes the system work: brave people willing to take individual responsibility and replaced it with a nebulous "we the people" which never ever did anything except as a battering ram inspired by these rare influencers.
It's always painful to see ritualistic narratives, generated almost automatically by using formulas that worked on the majority of previous watchers of other films - it's the reason why most content today is awful and derivative, but imagine how painful it is to see this by the numbers documentary done on the very thing that keeps us safe and sound. Now I am not the kind of wild eyed nut that adores the lone wolf hero, but if you think about it, most of the people that pushed out of the status quo aren't even regarded as heroes today, they are either ignored or declared villains. And if that weren't bad enough, halfway through the first episode, it goes on with how the Western society of pencil pushers noticed "something that we really needed to pay attention to" when the Wuhan epidemic flared. And what they did was follow "the playbook" and set up an international screening program. For those unfamiliar with the lingo, that's covering ass language. But before you try to understand what they are saying, they switch again the narrator, the context, talking about the Middle Ages and the Black Plague, then back again.
Perhaps the next three episodes will be better, but if it starts with this kind of crap, I probably won't get to watch them.
