I can not stand how every "documentary" on netflix is actually an extremely opinionated political piece or true crime. And I usually agree with the political opinion, it's just incredibly annoying and divisive, and really it mostly feels dishonest.
All the true crime stuff is retired officers cashing in. So much for books.
Most documentaries have always been very low on information density. Even universally loved ones like something from David Attenborough are mostly a collection of disconnected (yet amazing) film snippets with a bit of commentary over the top. It's only gotten worse as narrative has become more of the focus.
There are exceptions, but when it comes to conveying meaningful information and detailed analysis youtube is far superior than mainstream documentaries.
Except everything done by the BBC. I am so sick of slow-paced american docs that inevitably swing into conspiracy rants and crying interviews. If there is a BBC doc availible on a subject, that is the one i will risk my hour of free time watching.
I too watched the 3 Mile Island netflix thing. The only fact i trust is the coincidence of The China Syndrome hitting theaters the week prior the accident, and only after i verified through imdb.
There was no real attempt to compare the enormous toll of deaths and environmental damage of fossil fuels compared to nuclear. I kept thinking "did Shell commission this?".
To name one, Seaspiracy[0] is not like your friend who's from the opposite side of he political spectrum, it's more the crazy guy with "moon nazis are coming" sign.
Icarus was fantastic, for instance, but of potentially limited appeal (which is a shame, as it touches on a lot of topics of broad interest from doping in sport to political intrigue).
YouTube is perfect for 10 minutes of content without having to try to stretch it to an hour.
10 minutes has no relation to the complexity of the subject matter; 10 minutes is derived from the attention span of youtube viewers (and it varies a bit, but sub-15 seems to be the most common). An hour of content may be pruned until only 10 minutes are left, or two minutes of content may be stretched to 10.
Example chosen from the videos they're recommending to me now: Two documentaries from the same channel. One is about the Bob Semple tank, a wacky prototype from New Zealand designed by an amateur and never mass produced and never used. The other is about the 1960 U-2 spyplane shootdown over the Soviet Union, a serious diplomatic incident. One is 9:08 long, the other is 9:20 seconds long. What are the odds that both subjects just happen to have almost exactly the same amount of content to say about them?
Zero chance of that. Compare the articles on wikipedia, the U-2 shootdown article is 5x longer than the article for the tank. The two documentaries are the same length because this guy always makes his documentaries roughly this length because this is what the system rewards.
Watch some that are on film festivals, on quality tv channels (in Europe public tv broadcasting channels) etc.
Usually someone just wants to show interesting stuff without a political agenda.
Unless they are doing it the opposite way - have and agenda and want to support it with their documentary film.