When Docs Do a 180

Showtime’s nonfiction programming was sometimes flying by the seat of its pants this past year. And that was a good thing.

Weiner, a documentary that followed former disgraced New York congressman Anthony Weiner as he made a fresh bid for New York City mayor, was most gripping when new sexting revelations arose and the cameras kept rolling.

The Circus, a weekly docu-series on the presidential race, took its hosts and viewers on a capricious coaster ride.

And comedian and talk-show host Stephen Colbert pulled off a nifty balancing act when his live election-night special on Showtime suddenly took a 180.

“You could see it hit on his face,” says David Nevins, president and CEO of Showtime Networks, who was in the studio audience when it became apparent that Donald Trump had won the election, plainly stunning Colbert. The host jettisoned much of what he’d planned for an evening built around a Hillary Clinton win or a race too close to call.

Assuming a more sober tone, Colbert launched into a monologue on American democracy, capped with a poignant, if musically rocky, rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

“What you see is the beating heart of live television,” Nevins says of the turn-around. “[Colbert] is processing information in real time and it’s affecting his performance. I think it was very cathartic for audiences to go through that with him.”

The Colbert special, The Circus and Weiner (available on demand and Showtime Anytime) are part of a greater emphasis on nonfiction programming that Showtime has been exerting since Nevins took the reins of the premium cable network.

The challenge then and moving forward, he says, “is, how do you stay on the cutting edge of what people are talking about right now? I want our documentaries and our nonfiction, like our fiction, to be top-of-mind — things that people want to talk about and journalists want to write about.” Weiner certainly set tongues wagging.

Its filmmakers, Josh Friedman and Elyse Steinberg, set out to create a  fly-on-the-wall portrait of a preternaturally gifted politician with a ravenous appetite for media attention.

Pretty quickly, Friedman says, “He surged to the  top of the polls, and we thought this was going to be one of the more remarkable comeback stories.” Until approximately halfway through the race, when a woman stepped into the media spotlight to proclaim that Weiner had been sexting with her well after he had resigned from Congress.

“It was completely shocking to us along with everyone else,” says Friedman, whose camera caught the moment when Weiner’s sexting partner, Sydney Leathers, attempts to confront him in a media ambush and he evades her by slipping into a restaurant and out the back door. “You don’t begin a political campaign documentary thinking that it’s going to end in a chase scene,” Friedman says.

Perhaps even more telling are the uncomfortably candid shots of Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, who, after learning of her husband’s further indiscretions, is seen pacing in the background, trying to contain what looks like anger, frustration and disappointment.

“We see these scandals play out all the time,” Steinberg says. “But we rarely get to be in the room while it happens, and to showcase the humanity of people.”

Showtime’s docu-series, The Circus: The Greatest Political Show on Earth, also turned in a spate of vérité shots in its weekly recap of the ever-mutating presidential race. The three cohosts and executive producers, Mark Halperin, John Heilemann and political strategist Mark McKinnon, plotted ways to break from the press pack.

“Our theory was, there are some green spaces out there where you can go and look for things and not stand where everybody else is standing,” Halperin says. So they would travel with candidates who weren’t frontrunners. They finagled their way on to Trump’s private jet. Once, while the media bubble was occupied elsewhere, they staked out Mike Pence’s home in Indiana, unexpectedly bumping into Trump there.

Halperin’s favorite episode, “From Russia with Love,” aired right after WikiLeaks released hacked Clinton emails. To dig deeper, Halperin travels to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge. Although he fails to snag an interview, the shadowy, nighttime scene packs some suspense. And Halperin’s glee at exercising old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting proves infectious.

“It was in the moment, exhilarating and thrilling, and had a feel of danger to it,” Halperin says. “That’s part of great television — to try, with a camera, to capture a real-life scene that has some emotion to it.”

Reality is also what hit Colbert smack in the face on November 8. In partnership with his CBS show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he structured his live election-night special on Showtime around the looser FCC rules governing cable. He paraded a naked man out with an index card covering his genitals. He tested his freedom to say f—k without bleeping. More comedy was in the works.

As Trump began stacking up states, however, executive producer Chris Licht conferred with Colbert. Licht recalls the decision: “No more jokes, no more of the things we planned. Let’s just absorb this in real time and have a really raw reaction, just like the audience in the theater and a lot of people watching us are doing.” In other words, he adds, “We stopped producing it and just started living it.”

In the days following, as voters were either patting themselves on the back or licking their wounds, Showtime continued churning out nonfiction programming, including Trumped: Inside the Greatest Political Upset of All Time, a feature-length documentary assembled from The Circus’s thousands of hours of raw footage.

Since then, the docu-series also returned for a new season, tracking the first 100 days of the Trump presidency as they unfolded. “This is a story that, I think, people still want to follow,” Nevins says. “And there’s definitely more coming.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue No. 5, 2017