[Meta] For lay people, how would historians suggest we choose documentaries to watch?

by Real_Carl_Ramirez

A few days ago, my brother turned off the TV when my mum was watching Stuff the British stole. He claimed that this documentary is historical revisionism and fills people's heads with the wrong ideas.

So who is right here? I didn't study history in university, so how should lay people choose documentaries to watch?

After all, not all documentaries are reliable. Some of the most famous and influential documentaries, such as Super Size Me and Seaspiracy, although they were not on the topic of history, turned out to have many factual errors.

Libertat

You might want to look for some questions

Who's advising the film crew? As you're probably painfully aware from visiting AskHistorians, many historians love to show off their work, study, passion and knowledge and hence you have a fair deal of specialists that serve as advisors for documentaries and whose crew or producers readily inform of to stress they're taking the subject seriously.

What their names is associated with might be important : if they, for example, wrote several studies, are generally considered serious and reliable historians, have academic or institutional credentials, etc. basically proven they know what they're talking about, well, it's often a good sign.

Who is interviewed? Very often, people are interviewed (as specialists, as archaeologists that worked on the site, etc.) whose credentials and functions can be checked too, in order to be sure they didn't just ask a random person or a person whose field of competence is only distantly related to the topic at hand.

Who's the film maker? Filming, editing a documentary is a profession of its own and, barring amateur or tangentially related works, the author would have done over documentaries in their career and would have a reputation : are these considered good and reliable? Is their reputation solid or tarnished by bad realisations?

Does the documentary makes extraordinary claims? If a documentary is advertised as containing the revelation of a life-time, revolutioneering a whole field or earth-shattering claims...Well, now might be the time to be cautious. It might be true or it might be the case it's "only" extraordinary because it never was really vulgarized, too obscure or too recent, either way you have all the rights to be an active spectator and to say "Uh, interesting if true. It's certainly worth checking a bit about it."

What's the film about? Let's remember that a documentary is very often (not always, arguably) a consumption good and was made with the goal that as much people as possible (depending of the target audience) would watch it. Having some measure of spectacle, acting, camera-work, music and sounds effects, basically what's needed to make the spectator having a sense of relatability and entertainment is perfectly normal and expected : if you wanted to look at a book-like film, you'd have went to the book. But it's always a good idea to be aware of when too much is too much, when it becomes more about the "wow effect", more of an "historical movie" and less of a documentary.

All in all, there's no perfect way to say without having seen a documentary whether it's good or not, and even after having seen it you might simply not be sure about it either if you're not already familiar with the topic at hand.

Even there questions taken separately or together are not fool-proof : but if you're seeing a documentary made by people that already pulled some questionable stuff and that is bent on arguing with an orgy of CGI that, yes, ancient Atlantis existed and is actually Walt Disney World and you can bet it's true because it's based on the book of the sister-in-law of a Doctor in Applied Pataphysics...Well...

Busy_Document_4562

I tend to ask someone who is in a field or knows about it. You can even see if they mention it, if they don't, likely it isn't a good representation. The reverse can apply - if it gets recommended by someone unlikely to have any base knowledge about the field - it could go either way - but I am going to inform myself first before engaging with it.

All my linguist friends were going nuts about arrival - so as much as I have issues with the plausibility of the film generally, I know the representation of the linguist was pretty jazzy.

I know people who have no concept of science who recommend science based podcasts/documentaries/books and often with a little digging I can confirm they have no clue.