Gunther’s Millions: could this tale of a multi-millionaire dog kill the documentary for good?

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A highly salacious story lies behind footage of a diamond chain-wearing German shepherd on his private jet. But this series’s desperation to create memes risks undermining its entire genre

ocumentaries used to be easy: a shot of a guy with facial hair driving his car; some sort of Expo where people are behaving oddly; a pop-punk song that’s a bit on the nose; and a doomed attempt to set up a legacy celebrity. That’s what I used to like: grainy film footage, fuzzes of sound, filming on a windy day. Ideally, it would win an award from an academy you have never heard of. Michael Moore would turn up at some point wearing a big T-shirt and a hat.

This is no longer the case Documentaries are big business now, with budgets and cachet. This has ruined documentaries for a cultural cycle . The language of documentary has changed because the audience has changed: everyone who willingly appears in a documentary now knows they are one snappy soundbite away from being the Fyre Festival Bottled Water Guy or. Essentially, documentaries used to have a whiff of homework about them, a certain librarial dorkiness, and now they are for everyone.

To Gunther’s Millions , then, a Netflix documentary that threatens to bust the edges of what a documentary actually is. The core story is: in 1992, German countess Karlotta Liebenstein left her entire estate and a fortune now worth $400m to a dog, Gunther III. A corporation of money managers, attorneys and PR people banded together to best spend the dog’s wealth and maintain the Gunther bloodline – and those are the people who are telling us this story about the world’s richest dog.

Some people will balk at this one because, well, we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and there’s a really rich dog. I got a text telling me I was in my overdraft halfway through the first episode, and when I looked up from my phone there was footage of a dog wearing a diamond chain on a private jet. That rankled.

 

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