So this weekend I binged a lot of one thing on TV. But all in the name of one of my 2025 Projects…and that being: PROJECT- THE BEATLES.
Yup. This is the year that I get to know all I possibly can about the Beatles. With that in mind I have been listening to the first two albums of the Beatles (Please Please Me and With the Beatles) around the kitchen, while cleaning etc.
Also slated for the month of January was the documentary Get Back. I had made the list of documentaries based on lists I found online back in December (I looked at a few). What I did not realize is:
- Get Back is about the beginning of the end of the journey for the Beatles.
- It is a three part series of 3 hours each!
So we are watching this docu-series on Disney, and while I am thoroughly entertained by the shenanigans of the Beatles- their personalities, their silliness, their dynamics together, and how they get along making musical magic happen, as well as the fissures that are clearly there in their relationships- what I did not anticipate was signing away nine hours of my life watching this…
That is a LOT of material on the short period of time in the lives of these musicians, but with all the drama, it makes for great TV. So, I am definitely not complaining…but am shocked at how long this thing is.
I got to put faces on the four Beatles. While I definitely knew their names, I couldn’t have told you who was who amongst them, with the exception of Paul McCarteny. I got to see how good they were with their musicality and improvisation, writing lyrics as they went along, admiring works of other artists of the time, their fluidity with music and the various musical instruments.
The docu-series is based on a few weeks of the beginning of 1969 where they are trying to come up with about a dozen or so songs to release very shortly, and maybe perform somewhere at the end of these three weeks to premier their new creations. The time is short, the tensions are high, and they have a camera hovering all around them all day at work to possibly get material for a TV show- it’s a perfect recipe for a lot of drama to pan out. This time period is at the end of their fame arc just before they disbanded in 1970. Which means, what we are watching is artists who have worked with each other for years and have achieved the highest success. So maybe not the best place to start watching documentaries about the Beatles, but well, here we are.
I still have about 4 hours of watching left. And surprisingly, I am still looking forward to it!
And since it’s a SUPER COLD week here this week, I will be happily binging more TV watching the Beatles do their thing…