Gary is a documentary about former star child Gary Coleman. I watched his sitcom DIff’rent Strokes back in the day and I guess you could say I had a certain affinity for him just because we were around the same age. But once I grew out of sitcoms, I didn’t give much thought to him. I honestly barely remember his death in the news and certainly not his life in the tabloids.

I didn’t jump on this documentary when it released earlier this year. I was interested but I’d cancelled Peacock as a streaming service and it didn’t trigger me to renew. But I recently renewed and gave it a chance… and it’s a good watch, though a little smarmy in the long run.

You see, they’d already put the hit out on Coleman’s ex-wife. And while the film is full of bad guys and worse guys, they had pre-determined she was the final boss. I suspect that the suspicion was as shallow as the tabloid “journalism” that smeared her from the time of his death.

So while I found a lot of this documentary interesting, I walked away feeling trashy and used. It isn’t an earnest reporting, it decided who is guilty (spoiler alert: the ex-wife) and who in his life was just a bad person (spoiler alert: just about everyone else).

I still enjoyed enough of the doc to recommend it. Seeing all the old footage was interesting and learning there was a medical condition that stunted his growth answered some questions I never asked. Seeing the work he could get after his career dried up was sad, made sadder learning what kind of roles he wanted.

There’s some good biographical material here floating in a gross tabloid pond. Probably only a doc folks who even remember Diff’rent Strokes would want to watch… and if you are unfamiliar, it might be an interesting time capsule of the ’80s.

Score: 77