Talking TV: Documentary Advice From PBS’s ‘POV’

Documentaries have entered a golden age, becoming ubiquitous across streaming services, cable and increasingly, local TV news.

Amid the boom, POV, PBS’s long-running docuseries, is celebrating a significant milestone this month with the launch of its 35^th season, consistently turning its lens on social justice issues and giving numerous communities a voice.

Erika Dilday is the series executive producer, and in this Talking TV conversation, she shares the qualities behind POV’s longevity, what makes a documentary effective and how local television stations can tap their community relationships to create their own potent documentary content.

Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.

Michael Depp: POV is America’s longest running nonfiction series on PBS. The show is celebrating a 35th year milestone with its new season. This year’s 14 new features will tackle environmental justice, systemic inequity and global perspectives on motherhood and caregiving during multiple crises. I’m Michael Depp, and this is Talking TV, the podcast that brings you smart conversations about the business of broadcasting. And this week, that conversation is happening from beautiful, verdant Vermont on my end. Our conversation this week is with Erika Dilday, executive director of American Documentary and executive producer of POV. We’ll talk about the show’s longevity, the proliferation of documentary content on the TV landscape and the essential elements of an enduring documentary. We’ll be right back.

Welcome, Erika Dilday, to Talking TV.

Erika Dilday: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Happy to have you. So, Erika, 35 seasons is a long run for a documentary series. How many individual documentaries are we talking about here, roughly?

Oh, now you’re going to test my math skills. We run about 15 a season.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it’s over 400.

And you’ve been with the show for how long?

Just a year now. I’ve been in the orbit of it for a while, but just it’s a little over a year that I’ve been running the organization.

Is it safe to say that documentaries have come into a kind of golden age, or at least a prolific one? Because they seem to have populated every corner of streaming now. And then if we expand that tent to include podcasts, it’s absolutely massive. I mean, are you surprised by this?

I am a little surprised by it. But when you think about it, it makes sense. I think as we’ve evolved in how we consume news, there has been sort of an opening of people’s minds as to where they get it, how they get it, what they get. And so there’s been, I think, an opportunity for journalists to create content in different ways, like you said, with podcasts, with documentaries. And I think people are more open to alternative sources of media. You know, when nobody’s setting down to watch the nightly news every night at 6:00 as the way, you know, they consume their information or find out what’s going on in the world, most people have several different sources, and I think documentary has become one of those sources, especially when people want to get more in-depth on a topic.

And do you think having more distribution points helps as well now?

Absolutely. I mean, streaming services, I think, have changed the game on that a lot. The fact that you can, you know, go on to Netflix or go on to Amazon Prime or even on demand TV, and there’s a whole category of documentaries that’s fully populated, has just changed people’s ability to be able to see these shows.

Oftentimes documentaries have been accused, and not always wrongly, in my view, of having a medicinal quality. Is that fair to say?

I think that would be fair about 15 years ago. And I do think that the form has evolved. I think the entertainment factor was there and a lot of documentaries. I don’t think it really became as potent until about 10 or 15 years ago when people realized that it wasn’t just about science or nature or teaching somebody something that was purely educational. I feel like documentaries moved more from strictly educational to more journalistic. You see more stories that feel like a long news piece in a sense, unless they feel like they’d be rolling the cart in in your fifth-grade class to teach you about the lifespan of plants.

Right. Well, we also began to see some real experimentation, like aesthetic experimentation with the form, even a few decades ago. I’m thinking, for instance, of filmmakers like Errol Morris, you know, kind of reinventing the rules in the 1980s with The Thin Blue Line, you know, for example. So, how have documentary style and aesthetics evolved since you’ve been working in the field?

One of the things that I have seen that is the most interesting is how communities, people, places, subjects are represented. There used to be this idea that the filmmaker would be speaking into the microphone or whoever it was they were representing. And there’s been a real move to allow communities and people and subjects to speak for themselves, that there is no such thing as a lack of bias. But one thing that you can do is be more authentic. It’s the same way when you’re reporting something, you want to get a primary source. And I think film has moved to that, too. Let me not paraphrase what someone is saying about, you know, why the environmental disaster in their community is so dire. Let me have then say it. And I think that has made a lot of the content that we create more honest.

There’s also sort of a cinematic quality, I think, that’s crept in and taken hold in, at least in documentaries that I’ve seen of late. Is that sort of a hallmark now characteristic?

That I think was there in a lot of ways before. I think that it’s being applied more broadly. And also, I think part of it has to do with the fact that it’s very easy to go into a movie theater and see a documentary. And because there has been an appreciation of documentaries as films, there has been, I think, an uptick in the ability to create them as, you know, art, entertainment and journalism at the same time.

I want to come back to a point you made a second ago. Your show is called POV. Do good documentaries characteristically require a strong point of view? And conversely, can that create a problem?

Well, this is my personal opinion, but I don’t think there is anything anybody spends a long time creating that does not have a strong point of view. They may pretend that it doesn’t, but it does. And I think when you acknowledge that and when you represent something from that point of view, that you’re making something where the audience can trust you and trust what they’re seeing more. I think for too long we have presented topics, information as if it’s neutral and there is no such thing as neutrality. So, my feeling is you own your point, you own your biases and you put it out there as it is, and then you let people decide.

Should viewers draw distinctions between documentaries and news?

Sometimes there is no distinction to be drawn. What I often tell people and you know, I started actually in TV news and I moved into documentary, but that the way I see it, a news story is something that is useful in the moment and may be referred to again at some point. A documentary is something that will last for years and years and isn’t just referred to. It’s something that you’ll watch years later to see that moment in time.

So, local news is making forays into the documentary space, and they’re finding they can get a long tail with such content, particularly on their streaming channels as well. Have any of those projects come onto your radar, and do you have any advice for TV newsrooms that are making a run at making documentaries?

Yeah, and actually, I’ve talked to a lot of different stations that are looking at how they create that content. And what I my advice has been is to go out into the communities, go out into your audiences where you know them better than anyone, and create a partnership to tell stories. Do something where it is not about you telling the story, but you knowing your community well enough to know where the story is and facilitating the telling of that story. You know, one of my things is, you know, hold the mic instead of speaking into it for someone. And I feel that when you are in a local community, when you are of that local community, you understand it better than anyone. But the process should be not just to tell their story, but to work with them, to tell their stories.

Do you have advice on the editing side, too? Because one thing about documentaries is they can stretch and go on and people feel less constrained, especially it’s going on streaming as a distribution point. They’re not really hemmed in by specific time constraints. That said, sometimes more editing is better.

So, it’s funny that you bring that up because one of the things that I feel that people have not embraced enough is documentary shorts. There is this desire sometimes to tell everything in, you know, broadcast hour or, you know, feature length, cinema, feature length, documentary. And some of the most effective subjects are covered in a 20, 25 minute short. And not only is it effective, but it’s also more likely to get views. We have short attention spans as viewers now and listeners, and I think that embracing the short form of documentary is less risky. But also, I think it makes the content richer a lot of the time.

POV has been around for 35 years. Why do you think it’s endured so long?

I think we’ve evolved. I think one of the things that POV has tried to do is figure out what point of view means at the time and at the moment we’re in and to try and use that to really reflect back into our society the things that are important to us that we’re thinking about, that we want to know about. And so, the evolution hasn’t been that it’s gotten better. It’s just been a little different over time because things have changed in our world. And I think our focus is always what does the audience want to see? What does the audience need to see? And who is the audience? And that, you know, over 35 years, you know, that’s had some changes.

Has that audience changed a lot over 35 years?

It has. I wouldn’t say it’s changed tons, but our audience is getting younger. It’s getting browner. We’re seeing people actually view and use our content in different ways. We’re seeing people who watch it on PBS’s streaming. We also have seen a growing movement with a lot of community groups who will actually use content, use it to inspire dialogue or action, or see things that are important to them. And that’s one thing that I feel that our stations also do as well. They’ll say, You know what? You’ve got this documentary on the Philippines and we have a large Filipino community which would be really interested in it. So, we’d love to do something to create a public screening for that. And I think there is a desire to bring realize just, you know, the diversity in the fabric of this nation and not just put our broadcast up there and hope that people see them, but to actively look for people who would appreciate them.

When you’re selecting documentaries for inclusion in the series now, what are your broad criteria?

There has to be an authenticity to the story. Either the storyteller should be from the community, or have a good reason why they’re telling the story and how they told the story. It has to be something that will resonate with our audiences, something that will bring them from their armchair to another world or to a different community, help them foster some sort of understanding. And also, it just it has to be good quality journalism or documentary. How is the story told? How are the points of view covered? Is it something that we feel is ethical and fair and representational and entertaining? I mean, one of the things, too, is, you know, also with news is that, you know, a lot of it can be downers. So, we try and put some things in to that will be, you know, interesting, but, you know, not necessarily depressing.

Yeah. No light topics in this upcoming season are there, though?

No, not really. There are some I feel uplifting stories, but not a lot of light topics.

Maybe you’ll get a balloon animal making one mixed into. Well, that’s all the time we have. Thanks very much, Erika Dilday from POV, for this discussion about documentaries and congratulations on the milestone 35 seasons for the series.

Thank you so much and thank you for having me.

Thanks to all of you for watching and listening and see you next time.