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Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything hits Hulu after its Tribeca Festival premiere this past June. From Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries (Jim Henson: Idea Man) and ABC News Studios, and directed and produced by Jackie Jesko, Tell Me Everything profiles Walters, who died in 2022 at age 93, as a broadcast journalist who busted open broadcast media’s male establishment, single handedly developed the in-depth celebrity interview concept, created and co-hosted The View, and who tried – not always successfully – to balance marriages, family, and her personal life along the way. With access to interviews with Barbara Walters and a ton of archival footage, Tell Me Everything also includes appearances by Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, Andy Cohen, Connie Chung, Cynthia McFadden, Bette Midler, and Monica Lewinsky.
BARBARA WALTERS – TELL ME EVERYTHING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: “That was part of her process. I think Barbara would be friends with the devil if it would get us the interview.” In Tell Me Everything, the tenacity and approachability of Barbara Walters defines it all, from her rise in the business of TV news to how she carved her own perch as a profiler and interviewer. In 1961, as a junior member of The Today Show on-air staff, Walters was relegated to fluff and women’s interest stories, like trying on the costume of a Playboy Bunny. But she also fought for more substantive opportunities, for the right to develop her own interview questions, and to simply be taken seriously as a professional instead of being dismissed as a token or tea pourer. “I’m a good editor,” Walters says in her Tell Me Everything voiceover. “That’s what I do best.”
Tell Me Everything assumes a certain base of knowledge about its subject. The doc doesn’t establish a linear timeline, either in Walters’ professional life or her personal relationships, but it does connect her biographical info to its sense of her growth. Like: “a lot of the relationships she developed were career moves” (from her biographer) and “both are sacrifices” (from Oprah Winfrey, on Walters’ attempts to balance a career with motherhood). And in the early 1970s, as Walters leapt from NBC and Today to ABC and a prime spot as the first woman co-anchor of the network’s evening news flagship, her bold, piercing interview style – Bette Midler: “She’d put you at ease, and then go for the zinger” – became not only her calling card, but the standing format of an emerging celebrity profile industry.
So what, much of the hard news establishment still said. A woman could never ask the tough questions. But Connie Chung, one of several women journalists interviewed who recognize Walters as a mentor, says differently. Barbara Walters asked tough, personal questions of presidents, foreign dictators, and Hollywood movie stars alike “to make them human. Because they are.”
At times in Tell Me Everything, it can be difficult to figure out if Barbara Walters’ quotes came first, or if her thoughts – heard exclusively in the voiceover – were fleshed out with the doc’s access to its deep well of archival footage. But this lack of attribution doesn’t diminish Walters’ opinions. “It was a mistake,” she says of her five-million-dollar contract to become the first female co-anchor of ABC Evening News, because Harry Reasoner, the incumbent male anchor, was an unabashed hater. And Tell Me Everything contrasts the candor of Walters’ recollection with a quote from Katie Couric, who champions the move. “It was at a time when the women’s movement was really gaining steam, and suddenly we had a woman who was going to be delivering the news every single night.” What develops in the doc is a thorough composite picture, both of Walters as an industry trailblazer, and of the broadcast journalism industry itself as it reacted and changed across six decades of media history.
Photo: HuluWhat Movies Will It Remind You Of? Hulu also features Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge – fashion designer knew a thing or two about “living a man’s life in a woman’s body.” Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold is also of note here. And of course, The View, Barbara Walters’ unprecedented concept – a show for “women who want to listen to other women” – remains an enduring force in daytime television.
Performance Worth Watching: The directing and editing in Tell Me Everything, from Jackie Jesko and Andrew Morreale, keeps things moving with the speed of a news report. And it employs a smart visual aesthetic, with footage that appears in consecutive boxes – three different celebrity interviews, say, or converging news events – all connected through the constant of Walters’ presence. It’s as if the documentary itself was live from a control room where tape was being cut together around its subject.
Memorable Dialogue: Who wants some more tea on what Barbara Walters was confronting in her workplace, across decades of dealing directly with male co-anchors? Because Walters brought receipts. “Peter Jennings always put me down. I had a very difficult time working with Peter. Once in a while he said to me ‘That was a good report,’ like, oh what a surprise. I was used to working with bullies. He was the third bully that I’d worked with. Frank McGee, Harry Reasoner, Peter Jennings.”
Sex and Skin: Tell Me Everything examines some but not all of Barbara Walters’ marriages, and focuses especially on where her personal life intersected with her professional world. Did you know she dated Roy Cohn? And Alan Greenspan? Walters might have also slept with Richard Pryor.
Our Take: Imagine if there was only one podcast, it only aired like once a month, and everyone in the country swore by that single source as the only real access to any person who happened to be in the public eye. It was like that once, when Barbara Walters was putting up numbers with her primetime specials and one-on-one interviews with celebrities, newsmakers, and celebrity newsmakers. You can take this in confidence from Walters herself, who notes with considerable pride in Tell Me Everything that her March 1999 sit-down with Monica Lewinsky “was the highest-rated news interview of all time, and nothing has surpassed it.”
Everything has lots of access to big-name takes, so Lewinsky herself reflects thoughtfully on that interview, her experience with Walters, and how it even came to be. And the latter part is another interesting aspect of this doc – it can get a little inside baseball-y. Like when Oprah Winfrey recounts her side of that interview, part of the biggest American scandal of the late 1990s. The rub? Walters stole it from Winfrey. But Winfrey is also along to emphasize how much of a game-changer Walters’ work really was – for women, for journalists, and for American culture. “There really is no place for a ‘Barbara Walters Interview’ now,” Winfrey says. With social media, “Nobody needs an interviewer to get them to tell the story anymore.” But back then, the good get interview was the only name in the newsmagazine game. And after all of her hard work to get to the top, Walters for many years remained the only name in town to do it.
Our Call: Stream It! Informative and at times very revealing, Tell Me Everything builds like a product of what its subject pioneered: the newsmaking celebrity profile, this time created around Barbara Walters herself.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
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