How Netflix Conquered Bingeable True Crime
From ‘Wild Wild Country’ to ‘Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator,’ the streaming giant practically invented the docuseries
Eva Orner, the Oscar-winning producer of Taxi To the Dark Side and director of a just-released documentary, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, remembers a time when people didn’t exactly find her career thrilling.
“Twenty years ago when you were at a party and people said, ‘So what do you do?’ and I’d say, ‘I make documentaries,’ they’d kind of just back away slowly,” she says. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh my god, I only watch documentaries!’”
That cultural shift is good news for Orner and for her new film, a damning indictment of Bikram Choudhury, the hot yoga pioneer and sexual predator who assaulted his female devotees for decades before fleeing the country and an $8 million legal settlement. But why did that shift happen? The filmmaker believes it has everything to do with its distributor, Netflix.
“I mean, Bikram is about to go out to 190 countries and 150 million subscribers,” she says. “The one thing I want as a documentary filmmaker is for people to see my work. I want the world to know that [Choudhury] is a criminal. I want him to face justice. I want to give a voice to women who were abused. There’s not…
