'Pop Culture Investigations': TV Buyers Swarm After 'Quiet on Set'
Docs around influencers, child stars and Diddy hit streamers' top 10s powered by modest budgets, nostalgia and Netflix
So what’ve you been watching now that White Lotus and The Pitt are both done for the season?
My own streamer surfing recently led me to the docuseries Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing. What started as a curiosity click turned into an unwitting binge watch of all three episodes (each under an hour), even though I’d never heard of child influencer Piper Rockelle and her YouTube squad. Nor had I read press coverage of the allegations of abuse against Rockelle’s momager, Tiffany Smith, that were settled in a lawsuit late last year.
I’m not the only one who got sucked in — the show hasn’t budged from Netflix’s Top 10 chart since its April 9 release, and comes on the heels of last spring’s Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, which similarly examined Nickelodeon’s child star system. Quiet on Set was the top streaming title in its debut week, per Nielsen, became Max’s most-watched streaming title ever not long after it premiered — even beating out HBO’s The Last of Us — and ignited an industrywide conversation about kids working in Hollywood, led by my colleague Richard Rushfield.
“We were really just trying to come at this, first and foremost, as a story that could bring people together to talk about a really big topic that affects a lot of families,” says Bad Influence director Kief Davidson, who helmed the production alongside Jenna Rosher. Their deep dive into the world of YouTubers unveiled the underbelly of social media influencing and the cult-like community that Rockelle, now 17, and nearly a dozen other kid performers and their families were drawn into.
What do you call this genre of show, and why is it so popular? It’s not the perennial juggernaut that is true crime, though it lives in an adjacent space; it’s not quite true-con, like Hulu’s Fyre Fraud or Amazon’s LuLaRich or Netflix’s Tindler Swindler. Bad Influence and Quiet on Set have more in common with Lifetime’s Where Is Wendy Williams? or Hulu’s Framing Britney Spears, two other series that pulled in strong ratings and focused on the exploitation of performers. (The Williams series tripled Lifetime’s average primetime audience, per Nielsen; Hulu said the Spears doc was one of its most-watched originals in 2021.)
Quiet on Set executive producer Mary Robertson says she and her Maxine Productions colleagues refer to this kind of project as a “pop culture investigation.” Whatever you call it, this particular strain of docuseries has been doing gangbusters with viewers — notable in a contracting market where getting a feature doc made is more challenging than ever and documentary filmmakers are seeing their federal grants terminated by DOGE.
Such shows used to float around on basic cable (Quiet on Set aired in primetime on Investigation Discovery, aka ID, before streaming the next day on Max and Discovery+) but are now getting a new life on streaming platforms. You can trace the interest in the off-screen travails of stars, especially young ones, back to E! True Hollywood Story in the ’90s. And while lower-budget, more salacious versions still exist, this new breed of docs comes with the sheen of seasoned documentarians who build their narratives on credible investigative journalism.
The non-scripted market is “going through an adjustment, and so we’re in this period where we used to be serving a lot of cable networks that had 24 hours, 365 days to fill,” Courtney White, Wheelhouse’s president of entertainment, said during my “Reality Check” panel at NAB Show in Vegas.
In a streaming world, there’s less need to program every hour of linear TV. But these docs still have to break through the noise. “It’s more about creating these big buzzy events, more than about volume,” White said. Also joining for the revealing conversation were Pantheon’s Jen O’Connell, Propagate’s Howard Owens and Boardwalk Pictures’ Andrew Fried. Hear it all on today’s bonus episode of The Ankler podcast:
Today I zero in on these so-called pop culture investigations, made on 2025-friendly budgets, though they also come with unique storytelling challenges. Let’s take a look at:
Why this genre is so popular at a time when docs broadly are struggling
The typical per-episode budget for a docuseries
Which streamers are buying these shows, including the Hollywood conglom with two divisions sometimes bidding on hot projects
Netflix’s appetite for true crime and how its tastes have changed from awards bait to being on “the cover of People magazine”
The timely doc genre that is not in demand
How the Trump administration is influencing what docs are made
Robertson’s next project that touches on sex trafficking and other shocking allegations in a luxury arena
Doc pros’ advice for making stories with an “accountability dimension,” plus how to convince traumatized young subjects to participate