Given the subtitle — and, to be honest, the subject — of Jackie Jesko’s documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” (streaming on Hulu), I expected a bit more soul-baring. That’s what Walters, the pioneering journalist who dominated the TV interview for decades, was known for. As Oprah Winfrey notes in the film, Walters’s specialty was getting subjects from Fidel Castro and Anwar Sadat to Monica Lewinsky and Winfrey herself to say something they’d never said to anyone.
There’s nothing that really qualifies as a bombshell or revelation in this film, though. Like most documentaries about celebrities these days — and Walters, who died in 2022, was undoubtedly a celebrity — it features some frank comments from various interviewees, but carefully positions Walters in her best light: not a flawless woman, but one whose foibles don’t detract from her overall legacy.
That means the film comments upon but doesn’t dwell on some of Walters’s more controversial moments: grilling women like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga on their romantic lives, or cozying up to men like the notorious Roy Cohn. The lives of women in the spotlight are often scrutinized far more intently than those of their male colleagues, but here it’s not without reason: journalists who aspire to do their work in a fair, independent way have to accept that close personal relationships with subjects are off-limits in their private lives, and some questions probably cross ethical lines. But the film tries to frame most of these moments as responses to her upbringing, without spending much time on how they play into a broader American attitude of mistrust toward journalists.
By those standards, “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” is disappointing, and more of a puff piece than I suspect Walters herself would have wanted. Yet seen through a different lens, it’s also fascinating — a rather thrilling history of television journalism, as seen through Walters’s life.
That’s because she was absolutely a trailblazer for women in news, subjecting herself to plenty of ridicule as she took on one barrier after another: co-hosting a morning show, then anchoring evening news, landing consequential interviews, breaking ground with newsmagazines and innovative talk formats like “20/20” and “The View,” and ultimately creating a brand out of herself that signaled something to the public. There was a time when “the Barbara Walters interview” with a celebrity was an Event, something to stay up late and watch.
Throughout the film, a host of voices — including Walters’s own, via archival interviews — tell this story. Winfrey and the seasoned news anchor Katie Couric, in particular, are valuable in filling in the historical background, showing how television journalism progressed from an era in which “hard news” was the realm of serious men in suits, all the way to the years when Walters sat around on a couch with her fellow hosts on “The View,” mixing news and interviews with live-wire conversations. Alongside Walters, they tell the tale of a shift in the shape of TV news. A medium built for entertainment has slowly changed how journalism is delivered and what you expect, and you can see it happening right before your eyes.
Winfrey puts it best near the end of the film: There’s no place for a Barbara Walters type in the business anymore, she says, because “nobody needs an interviewer to get them to tell the story anymore.” Thanks to social media on the one hand and remarkably tight handlers on the other, by the time a celebrity is interviewed by a journalist, she remarks, “they’ve already told it.”
That makes Walters’s legacy somehow even more singular — and leaves you wondering, at the end, what the future of her medium will look like.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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