It's a bit unfocused and makes no sense part of the time. For example, we are introduced to this random woman who writes for Grey's Anatomy. A popular hospital series for women and as they claim it was revolutionary as it depicted strong women! I don't know about that though as it's fairly modern. The 3 episodes then focus on girl power stories. Mainly focusing on suffering. All women here have their own suffering stories and everything is dragged out as the documentary has way too much time to tell even small stories. Which becomes comedic when the suffering is ancient or insignificant and we basically see a woman on screen whimper as she tells her overly sad story about seeing someone else win an award for a story she helped write. The acting out with crying and whimpering makes it look like this stuff happened yesterday. It's both quite engaging yet also quite fakish. Some women do act this way day to day as they have plenty of shoulders to cry on so they do just that. But a documentary needs to make them look a bit more collected and focused. Not make them look like overly sad messes where we only see their pathetic jealous side and nothing else.
The slow pace overall makes tiny stories into mountains and the storytellers here make everything out to be some huge significant event. Which would have worked way better if the editors had a bit less runtime and more focus as we don't understand the story here. She's a fully insignificant person. Why are we following her dating life, her small writing credits, her being seen on screen that 1 single time in the show, her winning some small award for writing. They allude to her story not being true yet never really explore this at all in the first 2 episodes. No investigation, no one claiming her claims are wrong. Just people alluding to something unheard for 2 hours. Again, this works when it's a murder or something that large that lingers stronger behind the scene. Some simple personal lies feel less important and don't quite dominate the story enough.
I actually think the editing is good here in a way. It's just that the story doesn't fit the editing. A bigger story with more mystery elements would have felt fast enough and deep enough to have this slow pacing. It's still an engaging watch as human stories are always fascinating no matter how small. I did enjoy this as seeing a woman lie about having cancer to get a job as a main writer for Grey's Anatomy is quite interesting. The crisp colors and the bigger stories in the Grey's Anatomy writing staff interviews makes it feel important enough and I guess there is a lack of drama in the world so these smaller cases are made into overly expensive documentaries. I would gladly watch anything these editors put together. And after a while they will get their hands on big stories and show their skills. There are a lot of clean photos of most stuff they talk about. It feels a bit like the great Searching (2018). Similar focus on small clues. Yet we never get to see all details.
