You disappoint me, HBO

So there's this new documentary on HBO called "The Journalist and the Jihadi," which I watched last night. Well, sorta watched. This is one of those documentaries you don't really have to watch, because the content is all in the audio. The Journalist and the Jihadi is a talkumentary, not a documentary.

Now I expect that kind of shit out of A&E because they constantly air ancient episodes of Bill Kurtis shows, which are nothing more than talk talk talk, yap yap yap, boring boring boring. But I expect much more from HBO. (In fact, I had been drafting an entry weeks ago, contrasting A&E/Bill Kurtis Productions to Spike Lee/HBO's "When the Levees Broke," which had my eyes glued to the TV for 4 hours and 15 minutes.)

The constant talking in The Journalist and the Jihadi made me close my eyes. It literally gave me a headache because there was so much talking and because the pictures were mostly meaningless. For a while I stopped paying attention to what people were saying and started listening to the empty spaces between yapping to see if they could manage even a 2-second gap in the yap. They couldn't do it. Finally I couldn't take anymore, so I changed the channel.

Y'all surely know the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words," right? (Duh.) Well, many documentarians consider it absolute truth when it comes to making documentaries. The best documentarians consider it absolute truth. On the opposite side of the spectrum, as I so clearly witnessed last night, a thousand words isn't worth a picture. 20,000 words is not worth 20 pictures. I don't know how many words there are in The Journalist and the Jihadi, but there are thousands and thousands too many, and it was extremely irritating.

The Journalist and the Jihadi does not need to be on a visual media. The Journalist and the Jihadi should not be on a visual media. It should be on the radio or in a book. Radio and books are sound/word media. Film and video are for pictures!

I tend to think of most HBO documentaries as pretty high quality stuff. I'm talking about content quality, not necessarily production quality. But The Journalist and the Jihadi didn't even come close. I wanted to know about its subject (Daniel Pearl), but I didn't want it to be so much work, and I won't try again next time it's on.

You puzzle me, HBO. Why do you devote so much time, money, and effort to bad documentaries like The Journalist and the Jihadi (and Plastic Disasters, which I also thought would be good until I watched it) but then ignore me when I contact you about Aimless? Jesus Christ, I could have called Aimless "America Undercover" (which, as many people know, is the label or brand HBO attaches to many or most of its documentaries).

What happens when I do this? journalist jihadi hbo

Aimless