George Stephanopoulos On The Power And Promise Of Streaming Documentaries

The rise of Peak TV, or the age of television in which a huge number of high-quality shows were streaming and on traditional TV at once, may arguably be over. But we now appear to be entering the era of Peak Documentary.

Already this year has brought Hulu’s Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence and Pretty Baby, Netflix’s Pamela, A Love Story, Amazon’s
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Reggie and several others. Another high-profile, highly pedigreed doc will join them on Thursday.

Hulu’s Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, produced by George Stephanopoulos Productions and ABC News Studios in partnership with the Associated Press, marks a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the broadcast news network and the wire service. Stephanopoulos says the venue for the broadcast is a sign of the times.

“News and documentaries, like everything else, are moving to streaming, and we wanted to be in on the ground floor of that,” says the longtime host of ABC’s Good Morning America and This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “There’s clearly an appetite out there for people to get behind the headlines. And you see that people will spend time, just as they are with podcasts, they’ll spend time with documentaries to learn more about a subject. People can really follow their interests and do deep dives.”

Stephanopoulos has seen firsthand just how that excitement for a subject can build. In addition to George Stephanopoulos Productions, he and his wife, Ali Wentworth, have a production company, BedBy8 (a cute reference to GMA’s famously early call time), which produced the buzzy Baby, about modeling icon Brooke Shields’ sexualization as a girl in the industry and how women generally pay the price for such commercialization.

“Both BedBy8 and George Stephanopoulos Productions are looking for other stories that we can tell in the vein of Pretty Baby. They create different kinds of conversations, maybe a little bit more away from politics and public policy. We’re trying to live in both worlds at one time,” he says.

Clearly Knighthawk, which exposes more about the ugly presence of white supremacy in law enforcement, sits in the latter camp. The film builds on the award-winning investigative AP series by reporter Jason Dearen about the Ku Klux Klan in northern Florida, where three current and former prison guards were arrested for plotting a former inmate’s murder. The FBI discovered those guards were Klansmen.

Dearen learned about the FBI informant in the case, Joe Moore, and used his interviews with the star witness to tell a bigger story about how such cases are covered up and kept quiet, which preserves a corrupt system.

Working with the AP, Stephanopoulos had a chance to interview Moore as well, and the result is a compelling and often disturbing story. “We all know about the political polarization in the country, the divisions we’ve seen the eruptions of racism,” he says. “The FBI now considers the threat posed by white supremacists and domestic terrorists to be among the most significant ones we face right now, and there’s a particular problem down in Florida, where you have seen elements of the KKK in law enforcement and inside the prison system.”

Stephanopoulos notes the partnership with the AP allowed his team to really bring the problem into stark focus. “Whenever you have the kind of relationships and the kind of reporting that Jason did and we at ABC did, to get the tapes that really tell the real story, the things that people would normally not hear, it’s a magical combination.”

In a nice bit of corporate synergy (ABC parent Disney is a partial owner of Hulu), the trailer for Knighthawk bowed on GMA last week, and a piece on the doc will run on the morning show this week.