Midsummer nights’ documentaries on tech, design, futurology, anthropology, and art to refresh your watchlist. Let’s Netflix and chill!
Treasure hunting on streaming platforms can be a rewarding experience. We did it for you, digging for hidden gems in the documentaries section: we have fished them out of the Netflix library archives to give you something awesome to watch and learn during this long and hot summer, to refresh your mind with amazing insights
Losers (2019, 1 season)
It’s a collection of biographical stories and anecdotes by great champions. It’s a collection of teachable moments and life lessons from their spectacular failures, which serves as a springboard to take a leap towards new achievements.
Losers
Sports champions and Olympic athletes discuss how they’ve transformed their personal experiences of failure and defeat into positive outcomes, also dealing with social pressure, discrimination, or nasty accidents.
Every episode provides useful insights for you to manage academic successes, spinning a positive lesson out of rough paths or failures that you have encountered in the past or will be dealing with in the future.
Abstract: The Art of Design (2017, 2 seasons)
This is a legendary docu-series about iconic designs, the creative process, and the unique creativity of the most impactful designers of the last century.
Abstract: The Art of Design
The New York Times illustrator Christoph Niemann will bring you into his imaginative world, stage designer Es Devlin will invite you backstage to learn about the magic of kinetic sculptures and light mapping, and Oscar winner Ruth E. Carter will disclose her secrets for creating stunning and historically accurate fashion designs.
Don’t miss the episode in Season 1 about Tinker Hatfield Jr., the designer behind Air Jordan and the most iconic Nike shoe models, and the Season 2 episode about Ólafur Elíasson and “The Design of Art.”
100 Humans (2020, 1 season)
What makes us attractive? What’s the best age to be alive? How can we be happy? Are we biased? Can we trust our senses? All these questions don’t have simple answers, but we can attempt to explore them through an interesting sociology experiment with a comedic twist.
100 Humans
One hundred people have been cast for this docu-series and engaged in amusing experiments. It’s an entertaining way to shed light on biases and the factors that drive our social interactions.
Explained (2018, 3 seasons)
Looking for snackable video content? This format launched by Vox provides dozens of interesting episodes on various topics, from K-pop to existential questions.
Explained
Blow your mind with the episode about time featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and look into the image in pop culture of pirates, music, tattoos, beauty, and fairy tales. If you’re into iconography, as Sheldon Cooper is, don’t miss the episode about flags to learn how a piece of cloth transformed into a meaningful symbol.
If you are interested in the future of meat or the world’s water crisis, you can learn in a few minutes about these complex topics that will shape our future on this planet. Fancy understanding animal intelligence or the athleisure trend? You’re welcome.
The Toys That Made Us (2017, 3 seasons)
Take a trip down memory lane with a retrospective on the iconic toys we used to play with. Eight episodes of this docu-series focus on the history, product design aspects, user experience, and trivia about Star Wars, He-Man, Barbie, G.I. Joe, LEGO, Transformers, Hello Kitty, and Star Trek toy lines.
The Toys That Made Us
If you like this format, try also “The Movies That Made Us” about decades-long sagas like Ghostbusters, Alien, and Back to the Future, iconic must-watch blockbusters of the past like Die Hard and Home Alone, and horror movie staples like Halloween and Friday the 13th.
Gaia Giordani
Generative AI explorer and New Media Communication expert