The Beatles: Get Back

The story of the Beatles stretches out across a vast range of human experiences, touching on spirituality, politics, friendship, drugs, arrests, marriages, breakups, and even murder.The Beatles: Get Back Season 1 Download

The songs revolutionized pop music, taking inspiration from titans like Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, and influenced future generations of songwriters and instrumentalists, all the while enduring through musicals, films, television commercials, and archival rereleases. The talent and adventurousness of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison are well documented, the subject of a nearly 60-year cottage industry of official and unofficial Beatle ephemera. Every inch of the legacy has been thoroughly considered, every strength and weakness detailed.

It is strange, then, that New Zealand–based director Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, a three-part, eight-hour Disney+ docuseries culled from the dozens of hours of footage and audio recorded as the band worked on the songs released in the 1970 film and album Let It Be, feels positively chock-full of fresh insights into the inner workings of one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time. We think we know the story of the period in which the lads drafted their final recordings, staged their final live show, and ultimately broke up. We’ve heard that Yoko Ono’s presence in the sessions created static, that McCartney could be a taskmaster when he wanted, that Lennon and McCartney’s egos marginalized Harrison’s contributions. Some of this is true, but the footage tells a slightly different story: one of simple drift setting in between friends and of this last-ditch effort to fight back against the currents pushing the foursome in different directions.