Five riveting documentaries coming to Netflix in October
Netflix has clearly learnt one thing, and this is giving us somebody or something to obsess over, and we will happily keep leaving everything and bingeing it for hours.
You saw it happen with Tiger King. Joe Exotic stopped being the subject of a true-crime documentary and became someone everybody suddenly had an opinion about. Memes, arguments, theories, you name it, we were there.
Remember when Beckham was released? It was there, the fixation nobody asked for, but everyone was hooked. A while ago, people were obsessed with Death of the Pastor’s Wife, so also clock that true-crime docs have their own charm.
You probably recognise some of these names already. Better still, you may think you know exactly who they are, and then Netflix comes in and changes that image for good.
Well, be prepared because Netflix is coming out with more such documentaries this October, and here are five of the best you absolutely cannot miss.
Five riveting documentaries coming to Netflix in October
TYSON – October 13
Mike Tyson: that name alone comes with so much cultural baggage that any documentary about him has to push past the caricature before it gets anywhere remotely useful. That’s mostly because the public version of “Iron Mike” with the knockouts and bravado has been repeated so often that it can obscure the person underneath. The new Netflix doc TYSON goes back through his brutal Brooklyn childhood, Cus D’Amato’s influence and the rise that made him heavyweight champion at 20, while asking you to look beyond the mythology attached to all of it.
Oh, and don’t worry, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows here. His 1992 rape conviction and prison sentence are not going to be just another inconvenient footnote and will be shredded enough to get a spotlight on. What could make these four episodes worth watching is whether they actually let Tyson’s life stay complicated, instead of using his achievements to soften the uglier parts of his story. You want the dirt; you’ve got it.
The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable – October 16
Leave the boxing gloves behind, because now you are following one of hip-hop’s strangest rabbit holes, and we mean strange with a capital S. Tarik Azzougarh, better known as Cilvaringz, was a Dutch-Moroccan Wu-Tang obsessive who worked his way into the group’s inner circle and helped mastermind Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, an album six years in the making that existed as one physical copy. One. Imagine creating an entire Wu-Tang record and then essentially letting the world not have it
Martin Shkreli bought that copy for around $2 million in 2015, while restrictions meant commercial release was off the table until 2103 after his fraud conviction. He then lost ownership, and PleasrDAO eventually paid roughly $4 million for it in 2021. At one point, it seems like all of it became just about the money. But it makes you think about whether culture belongs to just one person or not.
Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald – October 16
After that multimillion-dollar album saga madness, you would be forgiven for expecting Netflix to keep the madness coming, but Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald takes you somewhere more brutal. Macdonald lived with cancer for nine years without telling the public, which is weird when you remember this was a man who spent his career wringing laughs out of discomfort. If you know his Saturday Night Live years, especially those merciless O.J. Simpson jokes from the Weekend Update desk, you know comfort didn’t exist in his dictionary.
The documentary uses archive footage, home video and Norm’s own voice, which feels right because imagine turning him into some syrupy memorial… a bit unfair to the legacy, plus, he would probably have hated every second. He died in 2021 at 61, and only then did most people learn about the cancer. Yes, you can feel sad now.
The One About Matthew Perry – October 27
Ahh, from one man who made us laugh to another! You already know Chandler Bing, or at least you think you do, and that familiarity is precisely what makes The One About Matthew Perry such an uncomfortable watch, because Perry spent years explaining that the man delivering those immaculate punchlines was often having a far rougher time than anyone watching at home could see.
His 2022 memoir did not exactly beat around the bush about addiction and relapse. The man had the dissonance of being adored by millions while privately coming apart, so when this series asks you to look beyond the sitcom, know that there is a lot waiting on the other side. His sister Mia Perry Bowick appears alongside friends and family, with archive material telling us Perry’s story.
Schumacher ’94 – The Birth of a Legend – October 2
Finally, we’ll end the list with not a murder or a scandal and hand you something different. Schumacher ’94 – The Birth of a Legend is the next Netflix doc on the list, although Formula 1 in 1994 was hardly what you would call relaxing. Michael Schumacher was only 25 when he chased his first world title through a season already overshadowed by the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger.
What followed later were controversies and penalties, with some disqualifications and race bans, so even before you get to the finale, you already witness a lot of menace. Of course, you get archive footage and personal interviews, with Corinna Schumacher talking about how “Schumi Mania” made Germany go crazy.