Sean Combs: The Reckoning is at least the third major streaming docuseries this year about Sean “Diddy” Combs, his life, and various aspects of his crimes.
One of them, Peacock’s Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy, was exceptionally half-assed and thrown-together, while also featuring several different instances of talking heads accusing Diddy of involvement in various murders, only for a disclaimer to soon pop up on screen to say “actually, there is no evidence connecting Sean Combs to that murder.”
I admit that I have not watched HBO Max’s The Fall of Diddy earlier this year. But now we have Sean Combs: The Reckoning, the first of these to arrive after Combs’ trial, which landed on Netflix earlier this month.
This one has a couple of unique angles: It’s produced by 50 Cent, Diddy’s rival and longtime enemy, and it includes some footage that Diddy hired a crew to film of himself, ahead of his trial, but which became available to the Netflix filmmakers for still somewhat mysterious reasons. That footage, perhaps not surprisingly, makes Combs look like a total asshole.
This all raises some very real ethical questions, as Netflix got into business with someone who has a very clear axe to grind with the subject of the documentary. Though on the other hand, I sort of wish something like this had happened with that Kanye West documentary earlier this year, and the footage had ended up in the hands of real filmmakers who knew what they were doing.
Directed by Alexandra Stapleton, who is a respected and serious documentarian, The Reckoning presents a pretty straightforward telling of most of Combs’ public career, providing probably the least charitable interpretation of each bad episode. Nearly all of it paints Combs, simultaneously, as a violent and abusive monster, but also as a pretend tough guy who acted that way as if to prove a point.
The template would seem to be W. Kamau Bell’s We Need to Talk About Cosby, which both established that Bill Cosby was a major figure of cultural consequence and also an abusive monster whose crimes tainted and overshadowed that legacy. The difference is that Cosby really was an all-time great comedian and television personality, whereas Combs’ contributions to culture were, let’s just say, much less crucial.
In fact, they kind of sucked.
Yes, the documentary includes shots at Combs’ musical abilities.
“He has zero talent, musically,” singer Al B. Sure says at one point. When we hear that terrible Godzilla song that had Diddy talking over Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” which is legitimately one of the worst pieces of music ever recorded, it’s hard to disagree with Mr. B. Sure.
Doubts are also raised about the image Combs cultivated for himself as the behind-the-scenes genius behind Biggie’s rise, when he might not have been all that great a producer.
In other words, it would feel like piling on, if it wasn’t so deserved.
All the Hits
The four-part, four-hour Reckoning does not only focus on Diddy’s recent crimes and trial, but rather goes back much further, taking a long tour through the “Legal Issues” section of Combs’ Wikipedia page.
All the hits are there, starting with the 1991 City College stampede in which nine people died at a Combs-promoted concert. The East Coast/West Coast rap wars, which kicked off Combs’ rise to fame, and culminated in the murders of both Tupac Shakur and Combs’s ally Biggie Smalls.
Then there’s the Club New York shooting in 1999, Combs’ years making reality shows, and eventually the abuse allegations and trial. We hear from many people, both male and female, who suffered at his hands, including Aubrey O’Day. Unlike the Peacock series, the Netflix documentary has the good sense to stay away from Jaguar Wright, who has raised allegations of “Satanic ritual abuse” and other such non-existent things.
There’s not quite a blow-by-blow of the trial, which, as a federal court proceeding, was not televised, but we do hear from a couple of highly questionable jurors, who give us an indication of why Diddy was not convicted on the most serious charges, although he’s looking at more than four years in prison anyway.
It delves into – although not enough – the weird people in TikTok who step up during any celebrity trial to be advocates and fanboys and girls for the defendant accused of terrible crimes, as we saw previously with Johnny Depp, Tory Lanez, and others.
We also see New York local TV reporter Julie Banderas, in 2003, responding to news of a murder accusation by declaring, in a straight news report, “all of us know celebrities like P. Diddy get dragged through the mud all the time.” (Banderas, naturally, now works for Fox News.)
Sean Combs: The Reckoning, while raising some ethical alarm bells, is nevertheless a fairly complete telling of this horrible man and the horrible crimes he’s committed against people, not to mention music and culture.
