God I miss the Eras Tour!!!!!!!!!!! What a time that was. Not just for me personally, but in the world at large. If you don’t remember (and somehow live under a rock), Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was a record-breaking 51-city, 21-month long concert tour that launched her career beyond superstardom into never-before-seen heights. It was the cultural phenomenon of cultural phenomena. And since the start of the tour back in March 2023, Taylor has released two brand new albums, two “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings, gone through two breakups, and now gotten engaged. What a time to be Taylor Swift and what a time to be a Swiftie. I’d been hoping for this documentary for a long, long time, dying to know anything and everything about what went into putting on this massive production and, if we were lucky, what this life-changing experience was like for Taylor personally. Taylor Swift: The End of an Era only covers the last few shows of the tour, picking up around August of 2024 and ending in December of the same year. In doing so, it answers some questions, but not all, opens up in surprising ways and holds back in others. But, more than anything, it succeeds in being a time capsule of an ultimately joyous time, despite all the bumps in the road. 

A constant theme throughout the six episodes of this docuseries was Taylor as a human being vs. Taylor as a star. I think this is something most celebrities struggle with trying to balance. And for Taylor in particular, as someone who puts so much of her personal life into her work and has made relatability her brand, it can be hard to find where to draw the line. In a documentary setting, we see the public-facing Taylor, onstage and in group environments, but we also see the unvarnished, one-on-one Taylor when she’s alone or just with her mom or someone close to her. There doesn’t seem to be too much of a difference between those two Taylors. Which is what you want to see as a fan: someone who is always authentically herself. But this many years into her career, how much of her persona has become a kind of act? Does she just always have to be on and performing? Is she even aware she’s doing it anymore? Or has she just become her persona? To quote a flawed movie about the nature of celebrity (that came out right around the same time as this series), Jay Kelly, “What do you say to people who say you only play yourself?” “Do you know how difficult it is to be yourself?”

But I also wondered while watching the series, how much of what we’re seeing of Taylor is “real”? She’s the biggest star in the world and this peek behind the scenes was made by her team and carefully approved. It’s not a revealing tell-all. We’re only going to see what she wants us to see. The Kardashians (not to invoke Taylor’s mortal enemies here) recently ran into a similar problem when they ended their long-running reality show on E! and started their own new show on Hulu. When they were suddenly in charge of their own output, the show became boring fluff instead of showcasing any interesting drama. Essentially, they chose not to include anything that might be too personal or show them in a bad light. The same thing goes here. I wasn’t expecting any hard-hitting journalism, but I was worried Taylor has become too big and overexposed that we’re never going to get anything intimate or vulnerable from her anymore. But then there are moments in the doc where she talks about her fame. In a conversation with Ed Sheeran, she mentions feeling “hunted” to which Ed replies, “I feel like people have forgotten that you’re a human being amongst all of this as well.” Fans often forget that celebrities are people too and they don’t owe us anything. Least of all access to their personal lives and innermost thoughts and feelings. Would I like to know “the real Taylor”? Of course. But maybe the question isn’t whether what we’re seeing is real, but whether authenticity can even exist when a persona has grown this large. At a certain level of fame, authenticity isn’t about total access, it’s about control and deciding which parts of yourself are allowed to remain private. The version of Taylor we know is real enough because it’s the one she’s chosen to share.

And it’s not like she doesn’t give us anything in this doc. She was constantly dealing with things in her life throughout the tour from devastating breakups to thwarted terrorist attacks to actual acts of violence committed against young girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class. And we do see her fully break down about these things and suffer from severe anxiety. But only when she’s alone. On stage, Taylor is the consummate showgirl. She can do it with a broken heart. She’s an expert at compartmentalizing. Not just for her fans, but for her team as well. Taylor needs to be the ~fearless~ leader for everyone. And because of her leadership, her people are ready to follow her into war. A surprising but welcome part of the docuseries was the time spent spotlighting different members of her crew, from backup singers to dancers to band members. I cried at every single one of their incredible personal journeys and what this experience has meant to them. And they owe it all to Taylor. They’re also fans of her! They talk about how Taylor’s songs are about her life but also feel personal to them, something I always say about her music. Sure, these segments are partially designed to reflect positively on Taylor herself, but they’re also a mirror of her leadership style. There are significant stretches of her self-produced documentary about her own career and her own tour in which other people take center stage. While all roads obviously lead back to Taylor (there is no Eras Tour without her), she not only allows others around her to shine, but encourages it. And, in return, she earns the undying loyalty of a team that believes in her not just as a star, but as a person worth showing up for.

While this series isn’t meant to be a career retrospective or life-spanning exploration (for that I’d recommend checking out Miss Americana, a deep-dive documentary on Taylor that I love), we do get to see some pre-fame footage. I will never ever get sick of seeing baby Taylor performing. It is immediately clear that this is who she has always been and was always meant to be. She was possessed with purpose from such a young age. It’s no accident she’s achieved what she has. She even says as much in the series in a pre-show hype-up speech to the crew: “Everyone likes to talk about phenomenons like the Eras Tour almost like it was pieces falling into place in some sort of accidental confluence of events that just happened, right? When I’m thinking about the people that are in this circle, I don’t think about it as pieces that fell into place, I think of each of you as like tectonic plates on the earth that took millions of micro decisions and forces of you pushing and pushing inch by inch closer together, and the Eras Tour wasn’t when all the pieces fell into place, that was when every single one of us had done so much work to where this tour was when we all clicked together. It is our job to make this look accidental and it is our job to make this look effortless, but I just want every single one of you to know that I in no way, shape, or form, look at this as the pieces falling into place. You put the pieces where they are.” At another point she says, “Everyone’s jealous of what you’ve got. No one is jealous of what you had to do to get it.” She works hard, she works tirelessly, she works endlessly. Many people nowadays have negative feelings towards her overachiever mindset. They feel like she has enough, she’s done enough, is it not enough for her? Why does she keep pushing to set and break records? But do these people not understand what it’s like to constantly be moving the goal posts for yourself? Taylor will never be the kind of person who is going to settle and be content. That’s what makes her such an amazing artist and force: her ambition, her drive. And it’s actually even more impressive that she hasn’t lost that considering how much she’s already achieved. But I did find it interesting to see her in The End of an Era think about the Eras Tour as her pinnacle and her peak. To acknowledge she’ll likely never do anything this big again. How will that inform what she does going forward if she doesn’t think she can ever top it? Will she try? Or go a different direction? In Miss Americana, which came out in 2020, Taylor said, “This is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp onto that kind of success.” A really funny quote to think about now that we know what’s happened with her career since then. But she followed that up by saying, “As I’m reaching 30, I’m like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” I think that’s still the bottom line for her. She just wants to keep working and pushing herself forward, not for the accolades or the records, but because this is her purpose and her passion. 

Like I said earlier, the doc answers some questions, but not all. I loved seeing the behind the scenes of the tour and backstage and everything that goes into making sure the show runs smoothly every night. But I wanted more of the planning of it. Rewinding back to coming up with the idea for it and creating the setlist and choosing the aesthetic for each era and every single detail of how we ended up with that final product. I was pleasantly surprised to get a peek at some of the making of her most recent album “The Life of a Showgirl” (released post-Eras Tour). But I would kill to see more of her process of working on her last album “The Tortured Poet’s Department”. I honestly didn’t expect to get that because it’s a much more emotionally raw album that speaks for itself in some ways, but any insight into that time would be fascinating. I also did not understand the structure of these episodes at all. The entire thing was a little all over the place. But, ultimately, I got a lot of the information I was looking for and a bunch that I didn’t even know I wanted and loved every second of it.

While I do think Miss Americana can convert a non-believer into the cult of Swiftie-dom, The End of an Era doesn’t have quite the same effect. This series is more for the people who are already hardcore Taylor fans who want every tiny crumb of content they can get. I went into the doc with the goal of learning more about the ins and outs of the massive tour and about Taylor on and off stage during the run. What I didn’t realize I would get from it was a trip down memory lane for my own Eras Tour experiences. Even more than the concert film, The End of an Era brought back the feeling of actually being there. Maybe because it showcased more of the audience perspective than just the performance itself. But the Eras Tour wasn’t limited to being at the show. It was a time in all of our lives when this was at the forefront of culture. When Swifties, myself included, would follow along with the show every night through social media, no matter what city or country it was in, and live in that moment together. I can remember exactly where I was when major moments happened, like when Travis Kelce came on stage or Taylor announced a new album or sang one of my favorite songs during the acoustic section. The tour was such a phenomenon because it became bigger than Taylor and her music. It provided escapism and community to so many people in such a beautiful way. I actually sobbed for the majority of the last two episodes. I don’t think I even realized how special that time was or how much it meant to me. And now, having some time and distance to reflect, I’m so happy to have this docuseries that celebrates it for everything it was.

2025 Count: 88 movies, 56 seasons of television, 5 specials