Looking from the outside as a non-Swiftie casually conversant in the surfaces of Taylor Swift lore, it becomes clear that the real triumph of the singer-songwriter’s massively successful Eras Tour was in its structure.
After all, the general idea that a globally beloved superstar with an extensive catalog would spend a lengthy live show playing various hit songs and deep cuts from different eras of her career is not exactly earth-shattering. It might strike less Taylor-centric music fans as what is often called a “concert.” Even the supersized nature of the show seems more like a combination crowdpleaser and status symbol than an unprecedented undertaking; Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen do three-hour shows, too, and they’re old as hell. Swift is in the prime of her life.
But what’s made more evident by The End of an Era, a new six-part docuseries streaming on Disney Plus, is the sheer scale of this production – how each album-era section of the show essentially constitutes its own set, going beyond a simple marathon of songs. A tour of tours, if you will.
It’s strange, then, that The End of an Era itself is so lacking in structure, at least so far. (The first two episodes are currently streaming, and the rest were not made available for pre-screening.) It starts, as promised, on the final night of the tour in Vancouver, just over a year ago. Then it moves back to Swift’s conception and announcement of the tour, and then jumps to the shows in Austria that were canceled due to a thwarted terrorist plot, followed by the next dates at Wembley Stadium in London (which the series vaguely treats as the first after a long break, rather than a ten-day time-out). That’s all in the first episode.
The second episode seems to cover preparation for shows in Paris several months earlier, before abruptly moving back to her final night of Wembley. Eventually, it settles into a more process-based narrative about introducing new choreography for a specific song, digging a little further into the individual dancers in Swift’s crew, and ending with the performance of that song featuring a guest star. It still feels a little disjointed.
Obviously, the series doesn’t need a strictly linear accounting of Swift’s time in order to work as a behind-the-scenes chronicle. But skipping around does the story no favors, in part because it makes it feel as if maybe there isn’t much of a story here; more a series of anecdotes, most of which flow back to Swift being a hardworking, credit-sharing, appreciative, benevolent overlord of pop.
She probably is most of those things (overlord included). But any acknowledgment of the artistic or even ethical tradeoffs of doing a massive-production stadium tour, like sky-high ticket prices (and scalping!) or the necessarily missing spontaneity when much of the setlist must be precisely replicated from night to night, seems to be verboten, or actively counter-narrated.
“It is so much extra work to keep things a surprise,” Swift says at one point, describing… changing part of the setlist.
That second episode kicks off with a behind-the-scenes chronicle of how Swift added a Tortured Poets Department set into the show, switching up the running order in the process, in between legs of the tour. It’s mildly interesting on a technical level, but hard to avoid thinking about how much ceremony is attached to something a lot of artists do pretty consistently. (Fans unaccustomed to following along with setlist.fm like it’s a Playbill may not realize this, but some acts play a somewhat different set every night!)
There’s some genuine (or at least genuine-seeming) intimacy in seeing, say, Swift draw a bath as she peels off her lashes and explains how the comedown from her performances’ adrenaline rush can sometimes take until 4 a.m. Doubtless, the remaining four episodes will contain other moments like this, and other bits of behind-the-scenes detail that will illuminate certain aspects of the production. (I never tired of seeing Swift zip around on some kind of understage conveyance that makes her look like Slim Pickens riding the bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove.) Swift Nation will weep and cheer along with the crowds and the artist herself.
Some of them, though, might also wonder, why now? Since the end of the Eras Tour, Swift has released an entirely new album, wrestled back the masters to her original recordings, and gotten engaged. It feels like her new era shouldn’t require five or six more hours of luxuriating in the previous one.
