• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 13, 2023

Live long enough and you get to see your whole life pass before your eyes, thanks to television.

In today’s rush to fill the content pipeline, networks and streamers are turning to the news stories and personalities of decades past for a growing stockpile of pop-history documentaries.

The latest is “Goliath,” a three-part Showtime documentary on the life of basketball great Wilt Chamberlain (1936-99).

It premieres Friday (July 14) on Paramount+ and then Sunday (July 16) on Showtime.

For those of us of a certain age, Chamberlain in his prime was one of the most famous people, athlete or otherwise, on the planet earth.

Those who experienced the Chamberlain era firsthand will no doubt get a lot out of this documentary, but the TV Blog believes that baby boomers are only part of the intended target audience for this docuseries and all the others.

The other and perhaps larger segment is likely the many millions of people in young- or mid-adulthood today who were not around for the cultural and historical touchstones of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and even the ’90s.

These kinds of documentaries have been piling up for years. For example, both NatGeo and CNN some years ago both had documentaries covering specific decades.

Two of NatGeo’s were “The ’80s: The Decade That Made Us” and “The ’90s: The Last Great Decade.”

CNN covered both of those decades too with “The Eighties” and “The Nineties,” but also had “The Sixties,” “The Seventies,” and others.

The names of all or most of the documentaries about bygone stars, newsmakers, serial killers and more that are now available to stream would be much too long to list here.

 Just a cursory look at the content lineups on services such as Netflix, Showtime and Max makes the point, even if this very small list represents just the tip of the iceberg.

On Netflix, under “documentaries,” you can find “Wham,” about the 1980s pop group; “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed,” about the late PBS painting instructor; “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe”; “The Martha Mitchell Effect,” about the wife of Watergate era U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell; “Waco: American Apocalypse”; “Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me” and much more.

On Max you will find “Being Mary Tyler Moore”; “Say, Hey, Willie Mays!”; “Hostages,” about the 1970s Iran hostage crisis; “The Princess,” yet another doc about Princess Di; and “Menudo: Forever Young.”

The Max list continues with “George Carlin’s America”; “Allen Vs. Farrow,” about the child molestation charges leveled at Woody Allen by Mia Farrow in the 1990s; “Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes,” about Muhammad Ali’s interviews on “The Dick Cavett Show” from 1968 to 1979; and the list goes on and on and on.

Showtime, the home of “Goliath,” has a very long list of such shows. They include “Belushi,” about the late comic actor; “The Kingmaker,” about Imelda Marcos; “McEnroe: The Price of Perfection”; “The One and Only Dick Gregory”: “The Reagans”; “The Go-Go’s”; “Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James” and many others.

The TV Blog hopes younger folks get all they can out of these documentaries covering everything they missed from the decades before they were born. But for me it’s “been there, done that.”