As much as I adore Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Judd Apatow‘s greatest legacy may be the documentary project he started fairly late in his career.
In the past decade, Apatow has directed or co-directed multi-part documentaries on Garry Shandling, George Carlin and Mel Brooks, as well as feature-length documentaries on Maria Bamford and Norm Macdonald, with the Brooks, Bamford and Macdonald projects all hitting streaming this year alone. In a documentary landscape wildly oversaturated with the stories of certain kinds of comics from a certain generation (or two), Apatow’s films stand out as the most thoughtful and thoughtfully made, puzzle pieces that will eventually come together as an indispensable record of a genre and its key artisans.
Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald
The Bottom Line A greatest-hits approach that suits its subject fairly well.
Airdate: Friday, October 16 (Netflix)
Director: Judd Apatow
2 hours 7 minutes
Hitting Netflix one week ahead of Apatow and Neil Berkeley’s Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story (and one week after the Berkeley-co-directed documentary about Marin Mull), Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald finds Apatow continuing to experiment formally.
If Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! was driven by the remarkable gift of Brooks’ ongoing presence in our cultural lives and The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling was driven by Shandling’s unreleased diaries, Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald defies the notion of documentary as a path toward intimacy. This is the first of the Apatow docs that feels more like an opportunity to point and laugh at favorite one-liners and late-night appearances than to learn anything deeper and more personal about its subject, which is simultaneously a limitation and the purpose here.
Macdonald, who died in 2021, is and was revered in comedy circles. He was a respected stand-up, an all-time great talk show and podcast guest and, depending on your age, the Platonic ideal of a Weekend Update anchor on Saturday Night Live. The latter was a three-and-a-half year run that made him both a truth-telling god and, ultimately, a martyr to corporate interference when he was abruptly fired for his refusal to back down from punchlines related to O.J. Simpson and murder.
Macdonald was also, for much of his career, intentionally unknowable. When he disclosed autobiographical details, they often deviated wildly from recounting to recounting. When he penned a memoir, he explicitly argued that it should be treated as fiction. Only in the last few years of his life, when he became a popular presence on Twitter and Instagram, did he give the impression that he was letting audiences into the “real” Norm. But when it was revealed after his death that he had been fighting cancer for eight years, it was a detail he’d somehow never mentioned in all of those posts and reels.
He was unknowable, but Apatow treats that as the path to knowing him. The conceit in Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald is that it’s the documentary version of a YouTube rabbit hole, building a portrait of Macdonald primarily through assembled clips, many quite familiar to anybody who has, on their own, gone down a rabbit hole of Norm Macdonald clips.
So that means a lot of footage from Macdonald’s stand-up, his regular appearances with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, his run on Saturday Night Live and his subsequent career arcs, which included a very brief tenure as a movie star and a run as an adored streaming talk show host. Instead of bringing Macdonald’s contemporaries in for original sit-downs, Apatow goes to the clips from countless podcasts and video shows in which those contemporaries reflected on and celebrated Macdonald.
Sometimes Apatow and editor Jake Hostetter utilize those “commentary” clips to show the love and admiration that Macdonald’s fellow comics had for him, and sometimes they use those clips to show how even those closest to Macdonald didn’t necessarily know his real age, his real educational history, his real romantic interests.
There’s a suggestion that something more honestly revelatory came out of Macdonald’s last few years on social media, but a lot of the clips from the end of Macdonald’s life come from unexplained and uncited sources, which makes them somehow both more and less trustworthy as a result.
Not every comic would benefit from this treatment. I’d venture to say most comics wouldn’t benefit and, honestly, I’m not sure that a more traditional approach would have allowed Apatow more insight. Part of why we do documentaries at all, rather than just letting people tell their life stories exclusively in five-minute late-night interviews, is the opportunity for depth and reflection that a filmmaker can evoke. That’s lost here.
But if the ironic remove of his comic voice was part of what allowed Macdonald to speak so many uncomfortable truths, Apatow creating a remove of his own is justifiable. Going back to the idea that these documentaries are pieces in a far larger project, it’s appropriate the the Macdonald film is premiering a week before the documentary about Bamford, whose unique gift has always been using absurdity and even surrealism as a way to strip away all boundaries between an artist and her truth.
Bamford digs deep and Paralyzed by Hope digs deep. By design, Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald flits like a moth around a porch light. It doesn’t cover or include every O.J. joke or every conversation with O’Brien or Letterman, but if you sit around for over an hour waiting patiently for the indelible Courtney Thorne-Smith appearance, it will eventually pop up, good for a big laugh as ever. It’s all accompanied by visualizations of various search engine queries and whatnot, giving the impression that you could have made this documentary in your own head but Apatow has saved you several steps. Of course, if you did your own searching and curated your own favorite clips, you’d get to watch the entire conversation with Thorne-Smith, but it might take you many hours. So it’s a service that Apatow and Hostetter have kept this film to 127 minutes.
Some of the limitations of the documentary illustrate, without comment, the limitations of a generation of standup comedy. For most of its running time, Norm features no women at all and no people of color, a suggestion of restrictions to Macdonald’s appeal and voice that I wouldn’t think was necessarily accurate.
Then in the closing segment, nearing and after Macdonald’s death, we briefly see Lori Joe Hoekstra, his longtime producing partner (and a producer on this documentary), and Molly Shannon, whom Macdonald once credited as the only SNL co-star to have his back in the immediate aftermath of his firing, as well as Dave Chappelle, whose presence will serve as a distraction to some viewers. Still, I wish there had been some way to get those voices integrated earlier, since it’s not like the world had any doubt what David Letterman and Conan O’Brien thought about Norm Macdonald.
Actually, I wish somebody would make a docuseries about the insularity of stand-up comedy, the voices who rise to a status deemed worthy of documentary treatment and those who are deemed too niche. I respect this current run of comic-centric documentaries, but it’s hard not to notice that the same people are making and appearing in all of them — that it’s self-fulfilling that those people represent, and become representative of, the entire industry.
That probably isn’t a documentary Apatow should make — though perhaps he could produce it on behalf of a woman or person of color. Meanwhile, I’ll just wait patiently to see whom Apatow chronicles next. Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald isn’t his best, but Apatow remains very good at this thing he’s found himself doing.