Every week, Netflix unveils its Top 10 lists for the week before, ranking TV shows and movies by viewership. One of this week’s most popular films is Untold: The Liver King, a documentary about raw meat influencer (there really is an influencer for everything!) Brian Johnson. He’s an online fitness guru who devours raw meat and promotes what he calls an “ancestral lifestyle.”
Johnson, whose body bulges with muscles that look exceptionally huge, has made millions of dollars selling supplements that he claims will help followers live their healthiest lives. But it was eventually revealed that he was using human growth hormones to help achieve his physique. The documentary is riveting because it doesn’t let Johnson off the hook, forcing him to admit a lifetime of petty criminal behavior that eventually led to him duping his legions of fans and customers.
Untold: The Liver King premiered last week and immediately peaked at No. 4 on the Netflix Top 10 but it’s just one of several incredible documentaries in the Untold franchise. The series is Netflix’s own original version of 30 for 30, the ESPN documentary series that also has a few compelling installments. (You can also watch more than a dozen 30 for 30 episodes on Netflix now, too.) But for my money, there are three more installments in the Untold series that are even better than The Liver King if you’re looking for a “truth is stranger than fiction” kind of tale.
Untold: Crime & Penalties (2021)
One of the very best is Untold: Crime & Penalties, a 2021 film about a Connecticut man with mafia ties who bought a minor league hockey team for his 17-year-old son and left his son and his goons to manage it after he went to prison. Jimmy Galante, who had built his empire in waste management, bought his son, AJ, a team that was called the Danbury Trashers — their mascot was an actual trash can — who gained a reputation for being brutal and vicious on the ice. (Allegedly, Galante and his family were an inspiration for The Sopranos, and the cast of characters who show up in this film as associates affiliated with the hockey team are straight out of central casting.) The whole thing is fascinating (and often hilarious), right up until the FBI shuts the whole team down.
Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (2022)
Manti Te’o was a Heisman Trophy contender at Notre Dame. In his senior year, in 2012, it was revealed that his grandmother and girlfriend died within hours of each other, a devastating blow to the college student but one that was not entirely true. While Te’o’s grandmother’s death was no lie, it turns out that the woman he thought he had been in an online relationship with for a year, Lennay Kekua, never existed. Te’o appears in this riveting two-part docu-series to reveal the extent of the catfishing incident that shook his world, as does the perpetrator of the entire hoax, Naya Tuisaosopo, an acquaintance of Te’o’s who duped him into believing he was in a real relationship.
Untold: Malice At The Palace (2021)
While the previous documentaries we’ve mentioned have all had something to do with sports or fitness off the field, the 2021 film Malice At The Palace exposes the truth behind one of the most notorious fights on an NBA court ever. In 2004, a brawl between players and fans of the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers broke out at the Palace of Auburn Hills, the Pistons’ home court. Dubbed “Malice at the Palace,” the fight caused utter mayhem in the arena and led to five players and five fans being arrested, and nine players, including Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson and Ben Wallace, getting suspended from the league as a result. The documentary, which features appearances from most of the players involved, examines how the entire fight was instigated by a fan and what really happened that night. The film also explores how the fallout from the fight has had lasting repercussions not just for the players involved but for the entire league.
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