Fair ≠ Honest

There is a version of this documentary that could have been made. One that took the access it had, the archive it sat on, and the tapes it drew on, and used them to do something the BBC has never quite managed with Michael Jackson: tell the whole truth. An American Tragedy is not that documentary. But it’s closer than anything the corporation has produced before, and in the current climate, that counts for something.

The timing is worth sitting with. The biopic is a fortnight away. The estate is generating headlines. Corporations that spent decades profiting from the controversy are not, at this particular moment, rushing to examine their own role in the conditions that killed him. Throughout this documentary, that pattern holds. Joe Jackson gets implicated. The legal system gets scrutinised. Jackson himself carries the weight of every unanswered question. The media — the institution that manufactured the hysteria, fed the allegations, and harvested the spectacle for thirty years — escapes without a scratch. A fairer documentary is welcome. A timely one deserves scrutiny.

Compare it to Channel 4’s Michael Jackson: The Trial, and the difference is stark. Where that production twisted Jackson’s words to construct a sinister portrait, cutting and framing to generate implication rather than evidence, this one lets him speak. Selectively, as these things always are. But it lets him speak. The controversial moments are tempered with his own voice, a rebuttal from beyond the grave that the man himself never got to deliver cleanly while he was alive. That’s not a small thing.

The film chooses its witnesses well. La Toya in the family home is essential — she lived it. Dionne Warwick, a peer who witnessed firsthand how the industry operated, speaks with authority about the specific difficulties of being a Black artist navigating a business that wanted your talent without your humanity. Childhood acquaintances and a fellow Jehovah’s Witness fill in the domestic picture Jackson himself often described: a man searching, almost desperately, for ordinary human connection. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the spiritual advisor who spent years inside Jackson’s inner circle and later published their private conversations, appears to explain a period the media has consistently misread — an attempt to rehabilitate himself, not merely his image. Ron Zonen, the prosecuting attorney in the 2005 trial, appears in the section dealing with the case; his presence alone is worth noting for anyone who has read the court documents.

To its credit, the series makes a genuine attempt to humanise him. Jackson’s own words about isolation, about the abnormality of his upbringing and his lifelong search for the ordinary experiences it denied him, are woven through the early episodes in a way that contextualises rather than pathologises. That’s rarer than it should be. And yet the score never quite lets you settle into it.

The score carries a persistent, sinister undertone throughout. It is there in the courtroom, yes, but also beneath footage of Jackson throwing a birthday party for his son Prince. A wholesome scene soundtracked like a true crime confession. Progress, of a kind. Then the string section tells you how to feel about what he just said.

What the documentary doesn’t mention is how seriously Gavin’s testimony was challenged on the grounds of its internal consistency. In a police interview in August 2003, Gavin stated it was his grandmother who told him that men must masturbate or they might rape women. On the stand, he attributed those same words to Jackson — the precise statement he claimed immediately preceded the first alleged molestation. When Thomas Mesereau, Jackson’s lead defence attorney, confronted him with the contradiction, Gavin attempted to resolve it by claiming both his grandmother and Jackson had told him the same thing. The number of alleged incidents also shifted repeatedly, beginning at five and ending at trial with two. None of those features here. The documentary presents the trial as a media circus consuming a small town. True enough. A prosecution whose star witness contradicted himself under oath barely gets a mention.

The problem is what’s missing.

The documentary asks why Jackson’s behaviour struck the world as bizarre, but then declines to answer the question properly. Rose Fine is absent. Jackson’s tutor and surrogate mother, the white Jewish woman who sat in the back of the plane with seven Black kids and called herself their mother, is one of the most important people in understanding how he came to relate to children the way he did. She shaped his belief that unconditional love could exist beyond blood ties. Bill Bray, his head of security and one of the few men Jackson genuinely trusted, doesn’t feature in this documentary either. These aren’t footnotes.

The 1993 case gets a fair hearing, as the documentary acknowledges that Evan Chandler wanted money. The detectives give their account. The documentary confuses fairness with completeness. What the production doesn’t pursue is the material defenders have long pointed to as suggestive of coaching — the sedation incident, the near-verbatim alignment between Jordan’s statements to Dr Richard Gardner, the child psychiatrist who interviewed both father and son in 1993, and Evan’s own articulated grievances. Then there is the $20 million figure, which defenders have long argued was no random demand. It mapped onto Jackson’s Sony-funded film production company, Lost Boys Productions, of which Evan had assumed he would receive half. The father wanted money. The documentary tells you that. What it doesn’t pursue is how defenders have long argued that this desire shaped a child’s testimony.

The documentary also doesn’t fully address the strip search conducted on Jackson in 1993, in which detectives featured claimed Jordan’s description of Jackson’s genitals matched what was found — a claim that has never been independently verified, and which the autopsy record complicates, given that Jordan described Jackson as circumcised when he was not. It’s fair game for the detectives to mention it, but it’s also fair to point out that detail, which the documentary doesn’t.

The Shmuley tapes — recordings of private conversations between Jackson and Rabbi Boteach, later published by Boteach as The Michael Jackson Tapes — were there. The production had access to material that could have explained, in Jackson’s own words, the psychology behind the behaviour the world spent thirty years calling predatory. They used some of it. Not enough. And given how comparatively honest this series is, the omission is the most revealing thing about it. Jackson’s words have always been fitted to a frame before they reach the public. The omission matters because his own explanations remain the most direct route into the behaviour the film treats as unresolved. A documentary built on ambiguity has little incentive to let those explanations stand too clearly. The media’s grip on that image is weaker than it once was. A generation that met Jackson first through the music is less willing to inherit old conclusions untouched.

The final third, covering Jackson’s last years, is the weakest. The debt, the isolation, the slow collapse — it’s all here, competently assembled and largely inert. We are told he died in debt. We are shown a man running out of road. Whitfield, one of the few people genuinely close to Jackson in those final years, mentions that he would be up in the night checking the doors — a man so stripped of security and peace that he couldn’t sleep in his own home. That image is worth dwelling on. The documentary doesn’t dwell on it. It generates sympathy without insight, which is the recurring limitation: it feels things without quite understanding them.

The documentary doesn’t spare the later custodians either. Joe Jackson started it, but the machine had no shortage of operators willing to take the wheel. The series implicates the entire apparatus — Branca, the estate, the wider industry — in the same logic of extraction. It raises the biopic Michael as the latest example of that machinery at work. After Leaving Neverland attempted to write the final word on Jackson’s legacy, cementing a verdict the courts never delivered, that reading is understandable, especially considering the many flaws within its presentation of the allegations. The estate’s response was a film. Whether that’s rehabilitation on their end or simply the right of reply with the unreported facts of Jackson’s character that wouldn’t feature in any other mainstream forum is worth keeping in mind before dismissing it as more of the same.

A Part 2 is reported to be in development. What the estate’s cooperation with Antoine Fuqua’s film potentially offers is the fuller context these documentaries keep gesturing at without quite supplying. Bill Bray’s inclusion matters for that reason. He is part of the answer these productions keep avoiding. If the harder chapters are to be told properly, they will have to be told there.

Here is the central irony, and the documentary earns it without meaning to. Jackson told Rabbi Boteach his father once threatened to drop him and his siblings “like a hot potato” if the money stopped. Asked directly whether he felt like a money-making machine for his father, he said, “Yes.” Absolutely. The machine didn’t stop when Joe Jackson stepped back. It just changed management. Sony, the media, the tabloids, the estate, the biopics, the documentaries — each iteration harvests from the same source. An American Tragedy treats him with more dignity than its predecessors. Given what those predecessors were, that’s a lower bar than it sounds. Ultimately, the film still leaves Jackson carrying the burden of explanation, while the institutions that made and fed on his image escape any real reckoning. The BBC has made a fairer documentary than most. It has not made an honest one.

It’s better. It’s not enough. And the gap between those two things is exactly where the real story lives.

Featured Photo: Michael Jackson

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Author Bio

As a freelance journalist, Ryan Smith’s work is driven by a commitment to restoring what has long been absent from institutions meant to uphold truth and accountability: honesty and transparency. Alongside his analysis works on the life, career, trials and tribulations of Michael Jackson, whose unfair treatment over the years paved the way for the path he is on, Smith also dissects and examines popular culture, such as books, movies and video games, always aiming to shed light on what’s beneath the surface.