Discovery+’s ‘Unprecedented’: TV Review
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Normally, a subpoena from a committee investigating insurrection is the sort of thing that could really ruin your life, or at least mess with your afternoon plans.
In the case of Alex Holder’s documentary Unprecedented, however, having footage subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee was the best thing that could have possibly happened, at least in terms of visibility. So then maybe it’s the best possible thing to happen for Discovery+, which suddenly found itself with one of the summer’s buzziest offerings — a documentary with supposedly so much exclusive access to Donald Trump and his inner circle that the government demanded a sneak peek.
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Yeah, Discovery+ now has a three-part series getting promotion from the halls of power, like if AOC tweeted, “Enough about the Green New Deal, though. How about Green Eggs and Ham on Netflix?”
It’s probably less good for Holder’s documentary itself, which arrived on Discovery+ this weekend preceded by enthusiasm that suggested bombshell revelations, a previously unseen glimpse at one of the most disheartening days in recent American history and the type of access to Trump’s inner circle you normally only get when they have memoirs to promote. The actual documentary? Well, to use one of the favorite phrases from within TrumpWorld, it’s a nothing burger. Unprecedented is three hours of poorly focused and repetitive blandness, with one or two moments of nearly accidental insight into the Trump presidency as an extended branding exercise and zero shocking revelations.
And that’s not an exaggeration. There was not a single thing in Unprecedented that rose to the level of tangible new information or even compelling new perspective. It’s a waste of access, a waste of time and the latest support for my ongoing conviction that there’s basically no such thing as a “three-hour docuseries” — only insufficiently edited features or insufficiently corroborated serials.
Fleeting Unprecedented amusement comes from playing a two-pronged game: What was the documentary Holder and company set out to make when they sought access to the immediate Trump family back in mid-2020? And what was the Trump family thinking in giving him the access, however unilluminating it ultimately ended up being?
To the former, I think the answer is that Holder and company wanted to make an unscripted version of Succession, the story of three children bucking for their father’s love and for the opportunity to rise from corporate second bananas to heirs to a potentially dynastic political fortune. The answer to the latter is presumably that Donald Trump liked the idea of a documentary that treated his family as a dynasty — particularly one that chronicled his presumptive reelection and the entirely unproblematic and smooth continuation of power in November 2020, a second straight stunning upset victory that the mainstream media never saw coming.
At some point, Holder realized that his access extended to the January 6 insurrection and he correctly assessed that that unlucky bit of luck would make a better hook than what appears to have been a 10-minute sit-down with Jared Kushner.
Here’s the problem, and this has to be made very clear given the way Discovery+ is promoting Unprecedented: January 6 doesn’t come until at least 20 minutes into the third hour of Unprecedented, and once it arrives, the former featured subjects of the documentary go entirely silent. Donald Jr. declined comment. Ivanka declined comment. Eric says — he doesn’t ask — that he would like to skip talking about January 6. That’s that. Donald Trump gives a one-sentence boilerplate answer, saying that most people at the January 6 rallies didn’t go to the Capitol and most of the people who went to the Capitol didn’t break in, but those who did were smart because the election was stolen.
A selection of journalists and academics are left opining on the deviating responses from the Trump kids — Ivanka allegedly wanted her father to stop the post-election fraud talk, while Donald Jr. was happy to pick up the fraud ball and run with it — with neither evidence nor corroboration. There aren’t even denials. It becomes Confirmation Bias: The Documentary.
Holder even had the astonishing timing to be sitting with Mike Pence as he gets the email resolution asking him to enact the 25th amendment.
“Yeah, excellent,” Pence says with a smirk. “Tell Zach to print me off a hard copy for the trip home.” Then he transitions smoothly to clichés and says, “I’m always hopeful about America,” evading the rest of the conversation entirely.
The actual on-the-ground footage from January 6 isn’t entirely unilluminating, but if you’ve watched any of the recent documentaries on the subject or the public Jan. 6 committee hearings, I assure you that you’ve seen and heard more from that ill-fated day.
For all of the nothing that materializes from the January 6 part of the documentary, you still have the various talking heads closing out the series by announcing that this all proved the fragility of democracy — which, of course, it did, but how does that relate to the first two hours?
The first two hours are the three Trump kids — Tiffany is in one scene, but not interviewed, Barron isn’t even spotted and Melania, not a kid but still a part of the family, is nearly invisible — sticking to the party line aggressively. Ivanka is Stepfordian, impeccably put-together and far more talented than her siblings at telling humanizing anecdotes. Donald Jr. is aggressive, off-the-cuff and willing to say almost anything provided it fits with the established family message. Eric is there. There’s nothing revelatory in their interviews with Holder, nor in the behind-the-scenes footage from their myriad fall 2020 appearances. There’s no deep takeaway about why this level of electoral participation was unique for the Trump family and whether governing-by-nepotism should or shouldn’t be a point of concern.
The talking heads offer familiar truisms about Ivanka being Trump’s favorite or Donald Jr.’s brief waves of rebellion or how everything any of the kids do is for their father’s approval. But none of them have specifics to share or personal connections, so they’re just making the same grand pronouncements made by hundreds of columnists and documentary subjects over five years. Other than Pence and that one pointless appearance, none of the non-family members from the Trump sphere are present to give secondhand stories about the kids, so the choice is to take either the axe-to-grind talking heads at their word or the robotic kids at their word; finally neither group is convincing and the back-and-forth between them becomes repetitive.
It’s mostly just a boring late-2020 chronology and the rare attempts to do anything amusing structurally fall flat. The “Give a subject an iPad so they can watch other subjects being interviewed and respond” gambit, which played so well in The Last Dance, yields nothing to speak of, either because Donald Trump is no Michael Jordan or because the former president is unusually cautious here. You watch Trump watching Ivanka and Donald Jr. and Eric at work and for maybe a minute or two, you try pretending that Trump is reacting differently to his different kids, when the reality is that more than anything he looks bored at being asked to play this dumb game.
Maybe you can find a way to make the Succession connections entertaining — Atli Örvarsson’s score, alternating between shades of Succession, The Crown and maybe a hint of The Good Wife, expresses the series’ intentions better than anything else — but once you establish that Ivanka is Shiv, Donald Jr. is Roman and Eric is Tom (or feel free to reverse those two), nothing is really added to the discussion. Without that Jan. 6 committee subpoena, it would have been easy to ignore Unprecedented entirely and after a day or two of curious rubber-necking, that will still happen with the Discovery+ release.
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