HBO Max’s ‘On the Trail’ Is a Campaign Documentary That Already Feels Dated: TV Review

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The 2020 election has strangely felt both more and less present a part of life than it’d have seemed likely on January 1: It’s more with us because of the heightened tensions stoked by our presiden…

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’s new documentary feature about embedded journalists reporting on the events of past months, feel something other than urgent at this moment, because it doesn’t feel of this moment at all. It’s not that the story it tells — of women reporters doing their best to balance it all against a political backdrop that has tended to punish women candidates — isn’t interesting on its face, or told well.

What the film — which is made by CNN Films and focuses on journalists from CNN, HBO Max’s corporate partner — does well is depict the difficulty of the embed’s job, from logistical to philosophical. We get a crystalline sense of just how wearying it is to follow candidates from place to place, to hear a remarkably similar stump speech repeatedly and to attempt to wring it for news value.

Wright laughs ruefully as she says this, but her point is well-taken, doubly — both that Klobuchar had little Black support, which is part of why she lost, and that CNN has in her eyes little diversity among its reporting talent, which is not likely to yield such direct consequences. More on this topic from Wright would have been welcome, but the CNN-produced film doesn’t go there.

These are issues that will outlast the moment in which “On the Trail” was filmed. But the effective end of that trail — with the winner of the Democratic Party’s primary running his campaign without leaving the state of Delaware — does mean that they were voiced in a context that is already gone.

Frequent montages of news events from only, say, six or so months ago, meant to situate us within our protagonists’ reality and to remind us of what exactly happened at when feel, instead, like jarring and unpleasant reminders of a campaign that is now effectively over. They tie the film relentlessly back into whatever news cycle is happening in its protagonists’ present, rather than allowing them to consistently address wider-ranging concerns.

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