NETFLIX's INSTADOCS: Why Speed Isn't The Real Story

Friday, September 4, 2026 - Something strange happened aboard Air Force One on July 8.

President Donald Trump had just finished a NATO summit in Turkey and was preparing to return to the United States. Reporters watched him get on board Air Force One. Then, unbeknownst to the traveling press corps and even some White House staff, Trump left the plane, hid inside a catering truck and was transported to another military aircraft because of a reported security threat from Iran.

The reporters flew home on Air Force One believing the president was still aboard.

It was a remarkable story when the details eventually emerged. What caught my attention this week, however, was something else.

There is already a documentary about it.

Instadocs: The Decoy Plane premieres on Netflix today - September 4. The incident happened July 8. Deadline announced the film on September 1.

When I saw the headline, my immediate reaction was simple. How in the world did they make a documentary that fast? The answer turns out to be more interesting than the film itself.

The documentary that doesn't wait

The Decoy Plane is part of a new Netflix series called Instadocs, produced by Words + Pictures. Netflix describes the concept as documentaries designed to “move at the speed of the story.”

That's a revealing choice of words.

Traditionally, documentaries have benefited from distance. Something happens. Journalists report it. More information emerges. Investigations follow. Eventually, someone recognizes that there is a larger story worth telling. Months or years later, the documentary arrives.

Instadocs is attempting to collapse that timeline.

The first installment provides an even better example than The Decoy Plane. On May 13, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Alex Murdaugh's murder conviction. On May 30, Netflix premiered the roughly 30-minute Instadocs: Alex Murdaugh, Unconvicted.

Seventeen days.

The second installment, The Prediction Games, followed in July with a look at the rapidly expanding world of prediction markets. Now comes The Decoy Plane, a 29-minute documentary about something that happened less than two months ago.

This isn't simply a filmmaker working unusually fast. It is an efficient production model.

Build the machine before you need it

Words + Pictures was founded in 2021 by Connor Schell and Chernin Entertainment. Schell spent 17 years at ESPN, where he helped create 30 for 30, and later produced projects including O.J.: Made in America and The Last Dance.

Libby Geist, another key executive at Words + Pictures, also came through ESPN Films and 30 for 30. Josh Tyrangiel brings a different but complementary background that includes Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Media and Vice News Tonight.

That combination helps explain what Netflix is building.

This isn't simply a documentary company trying to make movies faster. It is a premium nonfiction production operation adopting the instincts of a newsroom.

Words + Pictures has its own production and post-production infrastructure and describes its approach as creating a “frictionless production process from inception through delivery.”

That may be the most important part of this story from my point of view. The production model matters more than most realize. 

Most independent filmmakers start by finding a story and then building the machine necessary to tell it. They secure rights, find financing, hire producers, assemble crews, shoot interviews, locate archival material, hire editors, clear footage, finish the film and eventually search for distribution.

Words + Pictures has essentially reversed the equation, which is why I’m paying attention and you should too. Build the storytelling machine first. Then find the right stories to put through it.

When something happens, they don't need to spend three months assembling a production company. The production company is already there.

Journalism has always worked this way

The concept feels familiar to me because I spent a significant part of my career working inside a version of it.

When I built the communications department for the St. Louis Cardinals, my philosophy was that we needed to operate like a digital newsroom. I became an early disciple of brand journalism and built our approach around it. Our responsibility was to tell the team's story, but increasingly we needed to do it in real time. Just like a TV reporter. 

When fans started following games on Twitter, we staffed accordingly and provided updates as events happened. As we expanded into video and began producing a weekly television show, individual stories could become video segments, podcasts and social content. Some eventually became the foundation for longer-form programs and specials.

The same underlying story could move through different formats because the infrastructure and people were already in place to capture it.

News organizations have operated this way forever.

A major event generates breaking-news coverage. That reporting leads to follow-up stories and interviews. Those pieces may become a 60 Minutes, Dateline or 20/20 segment. Enough reporting may eventually produce a podcast, book or feature documentary. Sometimes the underlying story ultimately becomes the intellectual property behind a scripted television series or movie. 

I write about this in my book when I show how true stories make their way to us. Often, the path starts with a journalist covering the news. That news agency is owned by a big media company who repurposes that story in different ways to maximize the return on investment and fully exploit that IP. 

What interests me about Instadocs is how dramatically it compresses that progression.

Netflix and Words + Pictures seem to be asking a deceptively simple question: Why wait six months to make the documentary?

A Topic Isn't a Story

There is an important distinction here. A news event is not automatically a documentary. As I have written many times, a topic is not a story.

The unusual presidential plane swap certainly provides a great topic. But The Decoy Plane still needs characters, conflict, perspective and meaning.

In this case, much of that was hiding in plain sight.

Associated Press photographer Alex Brandon noticed catering vehicles positioned unusually around Air Force One. After covering presidents for roughly four decades, he knew something was different and photographed what he was seeing.

Reuters White House correspondent Gram Slattery recalls that reporters were later instructed to lower their window shades. Neither knew the president had secretly left the aircraft.

The documentary also incorporates Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe, who was part of the team that broke the story, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carol Leonnig, a former Secret Service agent and a former Air Force One crew member.

Suddenly, the story isn't simply about an unusual security maneuver involving a president.

It becomes a story about the people unknowingly left behind, the extraordinary security apparatus surrounding a president, and the tension created when protecting that president requires withholding information from the journalists responsible for covering him.

The headline provides the subject. The storytellers still must find the story.

Speed changes the economics of production

There is another reason this model interests me. A great deal of documentary expense comes from uncertainty.

Filmmakers can spend years following subjects without knowing exactly where the story is headed. Crews return repeatedly. Hundreds of hours of footage accumulate. Editors spend months discovering the film.

There is tremendous value in that kind of filmmaking. Some stories simply cannot be told any other way. But an Instadoc starts with a different proposition.

The event has already happened. Journalists have already documented much of it. Photographers and television cameras have created a visual record. The principal characters are identifiable. Reporting provides an initial chronology. The filmmakers can quickly determine which witnesses can add perspective and what larger question might elevate the material beyond a recap of the news.

Then they must execute. Fast.

The short running time matters too. These films are roughly half an hour long, not sprawling two-hour features. That imposes discipline while making a rapid production schedule considerably more achievable.

None of this makes producing a good documentary in a few weeks easy, but it makes it possible.

But what does speed cost?

There’s a legitimate reason that documentaries traditionally take time. Distance can produce perspective. More facts emerge. Records become available. People reconsider what they experienced. Initial assumptions prove wrong.

Journalists uncover information nobody knew when the story first broke.

Sometimes the meaning of an event changes entirely with time.

That creates an unavoidable tension in the Instadocs model.

How quickly can you tell a story without simply repackaging the news?

The question becomes especially important when the subject involves politics, criminal justice or other contested events. A filmmaker working months or years later has the benefit of hindsight. A filmmaker working weeks later is operating much closer to the uncertainty confronting the journalists who originally covered the story.

That doesn't make one approach inherently better.  It makes them different.

An Instadoc may sacrifice some historical perspective in exchange for something traditional documentaries rarely possess. Immediacy. 

The audience already knows the characters. People are already talking about the event. Curiosity already exists. The market for this documentary is now. It is still fresh and people want to know more. Over time, it may fade as one of many colorful stories from this Presidency. 

Instead of trying to resurrect interest in a story years later, the documentary enters a conversation that is already happening.

The real lesson isn't speed

It would be easy to look at The Decoy Plane and conclude that the lesson is simply that filmmakers need to work faster. I don't think that's it. The real lesson is readiness and building a model to seize opportunities like this to build IP you own.

Words + Pictures can move quickly because it has already done the slow work.

It has experienced journalists and filmmakers. It has producers and executives who understand nonfiction storytelling. It has production infrastructure. It has post-production capabilities. It has established workflows and relationships. It has a repeatable format. Most importantly, it has a distribution relationship with Netflix.

When the right story appears, the machine doesn't need to be invented. It simply needs to be activated. That matters well beyond documentary filmmaking.

We often romanticize the idea that great stories somehow find their way to the screen because someone is passionate enough to tell them. Passion certainly matters. But professional storytelling also requires systems, processes, relationships, resources and people who know what they are doing. Speed is often the visible result of all that invisible preparation. 

The fact that this is coming from the independent space rather than a big media company is what is really standing out for me.   Also, it is on Netflix. They don’t have a news division. 

The shrinking distance of telling a true story

I suspect Instadocs represents something larger than a clever Netflix programming experiment.

The boundaries separating journalism, documentary, podcasting, publishing and scripted entertainment have been eroding for years. Stories increasingly move between those forms, sometimes with remarkable speed.

The Washington Post may investigate something that becomes a podcast. The podcast becomes a documentary. The documentary generates interest in a scripted adaptation. The people involved become participants in an entirely new storytelling ecosystem.

What Netflix and Words + Pictures are doing is shortening the distance between those steps.

That creates opportunities for storytellers, but it also raises the stakes.

If documentaries are going to operate at the speed of journalism, filmmakers need some of journalism's discipline too: rigorous sourcing, verification, editorial judgment and an appreciation for what they don't yet know.

At the same time, journalists increasingly need to recognize the larger storytelling possibilities contained inside the reporting they are already doing.

That may ultimately be what fascinates me most about The Decoy Plane.

Something happened on July 8. Journalists reported it. Other journalists investigated it. Independent filmmakers recognized the story inside it, and less than two months later, people around the world can watch the documentary on Netflix.

The technology certainly helped make that possible, but technology isn't the most interesting part of this professional storytelling business.

Someone built a storytelling business that was ready when the story happened.



For anyone trying to build a sustainable future around professional storytelling, that may be the part worth watching most closely.