The Beatles: Get Back

• 1. Something Out of Nothing

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  The Beatles: Get Back opens with a scene from January 1969. Paul McCartney sits at his guitar, waiting for John Lennon, who is running late. While he waits, he plays. The song "Get Back" grows from nothing, fully formed, before the cameras. That moment captures what Peter Jackson's documentary series set out to show: the Beatles creating, unguarded, in the middle of a recording session. The series runs for nearly eight hours. It draws from footage that sat unseen in an archive for five decades. Jackson called it "a documentary about a documentary," built on top of the original 1970 film about the same sessions by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. For decades, those sessions had been fixed in popular memory as a period of bitter collapse. It was a moment when the most famous band in the world appeared to be coming apart. Get Back returned to ask what the cameras had actually captured. Jackson had almost said no before he ever watched a frame.

• 2. Into the Archive

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  Jackson's path to the project began not with the Beatles but with virtual reality. He visited Apple Corps to discuss a possible augmented or virtual reality exhibition. While there, he asked whether he could access the archival footage from the 1969 sessions. He was granted access.

  The archive held sixty hours of film footage, all shot in January 1969. It also contained over a hundred and fifty hours of audio from the original recording sessions.

  Jackson hesitated before committing to the project. The long-reported acrimony surrounding the Beatles' breakup had shaped his expectations. What he found surprised him. He later said he "was relieved to discover the reality is very different to the myth." Moments of drama existed in the footage, he acknowledged, but none of the corrosive discord that had defined the project's reputation for fifty years.

  The project was formally announced on the 30th of January 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles' rooftop concert. Ringo Starr said the footage showed hours of the band simply laughing and playing, nothing like what appeared in the 1970 Let It Be film. Paul McCartney said he was glad Jackson had found a way to show "the truth about the Beatles recording together." WingNut Films, Jackson's production company, would spend close to four years working through what the archive held.

• 3. Machine-Assisted Memory

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  WingNut Films had previously developed film restoration techniques while making They Shall Not Grow Old. Those methods became the starting point for the technical work on Get Back.

  The team built a neural network called MAL for the audio, capable of isolating individual instruments, vocals, and conversations onto separate tracks. MAL stood for machine-assisted learning. The name honored Mal Evans, the Beatles' former road manager. It was also a deliberate pun on HAL 9000, the computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  Music supervisor Giles Martin worked on the series throughout. Martin is the son of George Martin, who produced the original Beatles recordings, and has worked as a producer on Beatles projects since 2006. Disney, the series' distributor, agreed to allow profanity in the finished cut. Jackson described this as a first for a Disney channel. Each episode carried viewer discretion warnings for both language and tobacco use. The theatrical version of the rooftop concert received a PG-13 rating from the MPA for brief strong language and smoking.

• 4. What Fifty Years Hid

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  The series documents twenty-one days in the studio, each episode covering roughly one week. George Harrison's brief resignation appears in the series. It was an event Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1970 film had not covered. Jackson described the series as "tougher" than Let It Be for including it.

  Ringo Starr offers Yoko Ono a piece of gum. Harrison plays a Bob Dylan cover that visibly impresses the rest of the group. McCartney covers "Strawberry Fields Forever" and Lennon approves. The footage shows, alongside those moments of tension, something more intimate than the myth had allowed for.

  The filmmakers placed a microphone inside a plant on the lunch table before McCartney and Lennon sat down to eat. Neither man knew it was there. During that meal, McCartney told Lennon: "You're still the boss, I'm just the secondary boss." The two also discussed how they had treated Harrison, exchanged memories of earlier years, and talked about what the group's future might look like.

  All of those days were building toward a single event on the rooftop.

• 5. Rooftop and Release

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  The studio sessions climaxed with a forty-two-minute concert on the roof of the Apple Corps building. Disney+ premiered the series on the 25th of November 2021, releasing new episodes on the 26th and 27th. Over its first four days, viewers streamed 503 million minutes of the series. That figure was equivalent to about 1.07 million complete viewings. Fifty-four percent of those viewers were over the age of fifty-five.

  On the 30th of January 2022, the concert was released separately as The Beatles: Get Back - The Rooftop Concert in sixty-seven US IMAX theatres. Jackson participated in a live-streamed question-and-answer session the same day. The theatrical run grossed $391,252 on its opening and approximately $50,468 more when re-released in eighty theatres on the 9th of February. An international release in a hundred and eighty-one theatres followed between the 11th and the 13th of February 2022. The film's worldwide box office total reached $2.2 million. The audio of the full rooftop performance, remixed in Dolby Atmos, was released to streaming services on the 28th of January 2022.

  During the live Q&A, Jackson said he hoped to release an extended edition including three to four additional hours of footage and interviews. Fans, he added, would need to pressure both Disney and Apple Corps to make it happen.

• 6. The Critical Reckoning

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  Rotten Tomatoes recorded an approval rating of 93% from 119 reviews, with an average score of 8.5 out of 10. Metacritic gave the series 85 out of 100 based on 28 critic reviews, a score it labeled "universal acclaim." Sheri Linden in The Hollywood Reporter called it an "immersive, in-the-moment chronicle" of the band creating. Rob Sheffield, writing in Rolling Stone, singled out the series' quieter moments as "the heart of the film." Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times awarded four out of four stars. He called it "one of the most entertaining, compelling and important chapters in filmed music history."

  Alexis Petridis in The Guardian called the series "aimless," saying its repetition was "a threat to the viewer's sanity." Philip Norman, a Beatles biographer writing in The Times, criticized the editing. He argued that several inconvenient facts had been left out, including Lennon's heroin addiction.

  The series received multiple Emmy nominations at the ceremony on the 3rd of September 2022. These included Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, Outstanding Directing for Jackson, and Outstanding Picture Editing for Jabez Olssen. The Critics' Choice Documentary Awards nominated Get Back in four categories, including Best Limited Documentary Series and Best Music Documentary.

  The series was preceded by a companion book with an introduction by Hanif Kureishi. It was the first official book credited to the band since The Beatles Anthology in 2000. In a five-star review for The Independent, Ed Cumming argued that through Jackson's extended coverage, something had changed for the historical record. Any future assessment of the band, he wrote, "will have to measure up against the people we see here."