Broken

Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/bw50JJ1X5iA

Fake reviews, make-up with horse urine and fecal matter in it, lips being glued shut, and pink eye - and that's just the first episode! The Netflix docuseries Broken takes a look at some common things from our day to day life and how they have a dark side we know very little about. 

There’s only four episodes, each around an hour long, and the subjects covered are the make-up industry, vaping, furniture, and recycling. To be honest I found I wasn’t all that engaged by this. Make-up, vaping, and furniture aren't subjects that really interest me from a documentary point of view, so the one on recycling was the stand out for me. 

I’ve watched the first two seasons of another Netflix docuseries called Rotten and couldn’t help but be reminded of it while watching Broken. They are very similar and it almost felt like the Broken episodes were reject episodes from Rotten but they didn’t want to trash them, so packaged them up in their own series. 

Technically it all looks fine, it’s filmed well, and the subjects are laid out logically, but I just couldn’t get engaged in this one. Like I said probably more to do with the subject matter and my interest in it more than anything else. Although, that said, I have watched other documentaries about subjects that weren’t of big interest to me but which pulled me in because of how well they were put together. 

This was a weird one for me. It was fine, it just didn’t grab me, and on the hit or miss scale, this was definitely a miss.