This Thanksgiving, Peter Jackson will finally unveil his long-awaited three-part Beatles docuseries on Disney+, the result of combing through hours and hours of never-before-seen footage subjected to painstaking restoration. The result is a wonder to behold in this trailer, as we get the closest and most intimate look at John, Paul, George and Ringo most of us will ever get.
The documentary crew captured the band trying to record an album and plan their first live show in two years, which put an already delicate arrangement under even more pressure. This is the Beatles as we rarely get to see them: irritable and petty, but also funny and creative. The few clips we see in this trailer of them brainstorming up what are now universally known song lyrics are remarkable.
You couldn’t ask for a better director than Jackson, who has some experience mining a vast amount of source material with a rabid fan base to find the most salient parts of a moving story. Beatles fans know that the footage here is the beginning of the end of the Fab Four, and the few glimpses we catch of Yoko Ono and London’s Savile Row speak to the era of dissolution. But then again, it was also the era of “Me Me Mine,” “Don’t Let Me Down” and, of course, “Let It Be,” so this band truly had no off days.