Look, I consider myself a pretty avid Taylor Swift fan. I toiled in the Ticketmaster trenches to clinch Eras Tour tickets back in 2022. I made countless friendship bracelets, glued sequins on my face and burst into tears the second Swift came on stage.
I kept up with surprise songs, special guests and tracklist changes religiously for the approximate two-year duration of her tour — and even I can admit “Taylor Swift: The End of an Era” fell flat.
Streaming on Disney+, the six-episode docuseries follows Swift through the final shows of the Eras Tour in late 2024. Onstage, she’s shimmering in the spotlight: singing, dancing, performing acoustic mash-ups with her mega-celebrity friends. Offstage, she’s practicing furiously on her keyboard, giggling with her mom in her dressing room and signing million-dollar bonus checks for her cast and crew.
Surprisingly, the docuseries gives us only a few brief glimpses into the behind-the-scenes mechanics of this tour itself — a one-off scene about set design here, a brief backstage costume fitting there. For a tour of such colossal scale with so many moving parts, we get pitifully little insight into its actual logistics.
Instead, “The End of an Era” spends the majority of its nearly five-hour runtime celebrating Swift. Nearly every interviewee gushes about the pop star’s talent, courage and endless compassion. Almost an entire episode is dedicated to her cultural impact as a singer-songwriter. Onscreen text at the end of the series reminds us of Swift’s chart-topping success after the tour with her 2025 album “The Life of a Showgirl.”
Certain beats get hit over and over again until they feel incredibly tired: Swift cheering on fiancé Travis Kelce on her television screen, background dancers running choreo and adoring fans screaming from the barricades at every show. We also meet four of Swift’s celebrity guests, though each one spends the majority of their screen time complimenting her creative genius to the camera.
At times, the series feels like a PR puff piece, engineered in a lab to convince the public that Swift is both superhuman and a small-town ingenue. Some moments are so clunky they almost feel rehearsed, like when Swift assembles her crew in front of the cameras to surprise them with huge bonus checks.
We’re meant to marvel at Swift’s authenticity here, though even that comes off feeling calculated.
That being said, there are certainly moments in this docuseries that carry genuine emotion. In the first episode, Swift breaks down in tears upon meeting grieving parents at her London show and discusses the struggles behind cancelling her Vienna stop because of a foiled terrorist plot.
It’s also heartwarming to see Swift’s relationship with Kelce bloom in the cracks of her busy schedule. I adored hearing the background dancers and singers discuss how this tour has completely changed their lives. I even found myself on the verge of tears watching the last episode, as we see the curtains fall on the final shows of the tour’s nearly two-year run.
Did the docuseries need to be five hours long? Certainly not. Could it have had more information? Absolutely.
But ultimately, I do think a career achievement as impressive as the Eras Tour deserved to be celebrated with a documentary. And I’m glad we got to see some glimpses behind the scenes of this record-breaking tour — however few and far between they were.
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