Between March 2023 and December 2024, Taylor Swift carried out what can now be considered the most lucrative music tour of all time. She raised about $2 billion and gathered 10 million attendees. Throughout 149 concerts in 21 countries, the artist presented an impressive show of over three hours that served as a monumental overview of her 18-year career. Even for someone not particularly a swiftie, the ins and outs of the creative and logistical process of a tour of this magnitude are fascinating.
On December 13, coinciding with the artist's birthday, Disney+ premiered The End of an Era, the documentary series that promised to reveal all the behind-the-scenes secrets of the major musical event of 2023. This celebration was complemented by the release of The Eras Tour: The Final Show, her concert in Vancouver recorded in 4K. However, the six episodes that unravel the intricacies of Taylor Swift's tour fail to fully exploit their potential to captivate those unfamiliar with her, ending up as a rather uniform, even cheesy narrative that hardly resonates with an audience beyond the most devoted fans. And there is little more to discover for those fans.
It's not news that Taylor Swift is an expert in monetizing every part of her creative process and packaging it as a mass cultural product, shiny bow included. She did it in 2024 with the Eras Tour movie, which reached cinemas worldwide, and once again with the grand screening of her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. The film reused the lyric videos of each song along with unseen comments from the artist and teased the music video for the single The Fate of Ophelia a few days before its public release on YouTube. Nothing less, and nothing more.
But let's go back to The End of an Era. The first episode delves into the star's room before and after the first of the five concerts she performed at Wembley Stadium, in London. Just a few days earlier, in August 2024, she had to cancel the three scheduled dates in Vienna due to an imminent terrorist threat.
"We narrowly escaped what could have been a massacre. So I've been a bit disoriented," recalls Swift sitting on a sofa in her London hotel. And she can't hold back tears when referring to the "horrible attack" that had just occurred in the English town of Southport during a themed dance class, where three young girls died: "I'm going to meet some of the victims' families tonight and then I'm going to perform a pop concert. It's shocking."
This is just one of the many dramatic peaks of the series, which succeeds precisely in shining a light on what is usually left untold. A feat with no greater glory because it is, in fact, what is expected from a documentary like this: to show the most human side of a mega-tour.
The End of an Era achieves this. The Eras Tour, as reiterated countless times throughout the six episodes like a mantra, is not only a tribute to Taylor Swift's musical work but a superlative project, "colossal, extraordinary, unprecedented", the best showcase for "the best team in the world."
The documentary reflects how Swift intensely prepared herself physically six months before the first concert and how she built a close relationship with all members of her team. It puts her mother, Andrea Finlay, involved in her career from the beginning of time, in front of the camera to tell her version of the crazy story that is her life. Also her brother and father. In the fifth episode, she speaks deeply emotionally about her grandmother Marjorie, an opera singer. But above all, it gives names and stories to each of the different dancers and technical and creative team members, which is great even if the ultimate goal is simply self-praise. For example, the special mention of the media-covered bonus that the singer granted to her beloved crew halfway through the tour, although the exact amount of that extra pay is never revealed.
More things that will delight the swifties: the secret preparation and recording of The Life of a Showgirl or the meticulous incorporation of the set of The Tortured Poets Department during a tour break. Also, the way Swift constructs acoustic medleys and shapes the anticipated "surprise songs" for each show as if by magic, which is not magic but talent.
The worst part of the documentary, however, is possibly the excessively mushy inclusion, which even surpasses the limits of cheesiness, of the singer's boyfriend in the footage. In summary: Travis Kelce is everywhere. From his providential appearance as a spectator at the Kansas City concert -which would end in romance- to NFL televised games as a backstage ritual of the tour. "Some people take vitamins, I have these conversations with you," confesses Swift in one of the phone chats with her partner shown in the film.
Perhaps we are too accustomed to the lovestruck Taylor and much less to the melancholic and heartbroken Taylor; the one who wrote her best lyrics, on the other hand. "Men may disappoint you, but the Eras Tour never will", she says in one of the most talked-about scenes in the docuseries on social media. That's it.