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By now, the fallout from Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram broadside against his parents has reached a point of total saturation. There have been news reports, memes, obsessive TikTok deep dives and newspaper thinkpieces covering the story from every conceivable angle. “Brooklyn Beckham is doing his best” said the New York Times. “It’s time to believe adult children when they speak out against their toxic parents,” said BuzzFeed. “The Beckham family feud is every mother’s worst nightmare,” said the Independent. And on it went.
So you have to respect Channel 4 for gazing out across this exhausting event horizon of a story and identifying a gap in the market. Until now, nobody has managed to turn the Beckham family drama into a shrill 30-minute primetime documentary where a lorryload of content creators flap their hands while providing no new information or insight. Thanks to Beckham: Family at War, that gap has been filled. Congratulations, everyone.
What a baffling documentary this is. It offers a surface-level explanation of the story (a young man severing ties with his apparently controlling family), which would have been handy for a mainstream novice audience, but the entire thing is fully geared towards the sort of terminally online person who already knows the drama in forensic detail, and those aren’t people who are likely to watch Channel 4 on a midweek evening.
“Trump and Greenland, tension in the Middle East and ICE in Minnesota,” begins the show, accompanied by footage of terrifying world events. “It was already shaping up to be a huge news week … but then came Brooklyn’s online honesty bomb.” Which, you have to admit, is a wildly plucky way to open a documentary.
The documentary’s recapping of the story is breathlessly ridiculous, told via talking heads who run the gamut from people who have Instagram accounts to people who have TikTok accounts. We see the posts they made reacting to the story then we see them reacting to their own posts from the confines of a dingy talking-head dungeon. “I looked at his story and I was like ‘Oh my God,’” one of them says, teeing up the baseline level of expertise we should expect.
It also skims over the biggest reverberations of the story, namely that “[DJ] Fat Tony gave much-needed context” to claims about Brooklyn’s wedding on This Morning, and that archive footage of the Beckhams proves that “the awks moments kept coming”. Some substance eventually arrives, in the form of a psychologist and a resilience coach (here to contextualise the difficulties of being brought up in the public eye), as well as a brief discussion of the financial implications of trademarking the names of your children into adulthood. But this is quickly waved away as soon as it arrives, presumably out of embarrassment that they take any of this seriously.
If you were being extremely sympathetic, you could argue that Beckham: Family at War is a celebration of a media event that briefly united the country. In that sense, it is less a documentary and more a weird mutation of those I Love the 1980s shows that used to fill up schedules, where paid talking heads would overenthusiastically react to past events. Except that the Brooklyn Beckham thing is so recent that nobody has gained the space to apply much in the way of context, so it’s really more I Love This Thing on Instagram That Literally Only Just Happened.
The interviewees are all careful to both-sides the issue. For everyone who expresses sympathy for Brooklyn, depicting him as a clueless nepo-baby ragdoll who finds himself being hurled around at the whims of two powerful families, there is another quick to praise David and Victoria Beckham’s impenetrable wall of brand management. Perhaps the most telling moment is when an interviewee proudly declares himself to be “Team Drama”. It doesn’t matter what happened, or who it happened to, because the main thing is that it’s messy and public and famous people are involved.
That’s Beckham: Family at War in a nutshell. It is The World at War for people who’ve just been banged on the head, a triumph of noise for the sake of noise. Exhausting, isn’t it?
