You Can't Make This Up

Rebecca Lavoie hosts this weekly Netflix companion show about how the streamer biggest documentaries actually get made, and what happened to the people in them after the cameras stopped rolling. Lavoie is a seasoned journalist and longtime true crime commentator, and she brings real interview skills to the job. Her conversations with directors, producers, and subjects tend to run long and stay specific, which is where the good stuff usually lives. Recent episodes have covered the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping revisited, the Sean Combs investigation, the America Next Top Model reckoning, the microplastics documentary Plastic People, and a biographical piece on Eddie Murphy. You hear filmmakers explain why they chased certain sources for years, how they built trust with reluctant participants, and what they had to leave on the cutting room floor for legal or ethical reasons. Subjects themselves talk about what it was like to watch their own lives edited into ninety minutes of streaming television. Episodes run about thirty to fifty minutes, release on Wednesdays, and are produced in partnership with Partners in Crime Media. It is a useful listen if you have ever finished a Netflix documentary and wanted the director commentary and the subject side of the story in one place. Even casual documentary fans will come away with a sharper sense of how these projects get shaped.