The Gwyneth Paltrow Trial Documentary Manages the Impossible

By Alison Lanier | TV | December 22, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | December 22, 2023 |

The docuseries takes a viral internet event stocked with celebrity and courtroom drama and makes it not only pointless but somehow boring.

Yes, we’re doing this story again. A new docuseries, Gwyneth vs. Terry: The Ski Crash Trial, tells the overblown saga of the celebrity-vs.-Joe-Schmo trial that took place earlier this year. And while the trial itself was vastly entertaining as a meme-machine on Twitter (RIP), the show rehashing the trial is absolutely not worth the time it takes to absorb as background noise.

(Also, is it even a docuseries? That’s how it was billed, but the whole one-hour doc was released as a single episode, so…???)

This past spring, as the trial was unfolding, there was a huge media uproar over it, which became an international spectacle. Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist, sued Gwyneth Paltrow for $300,000, who then countersued for $1 for injuries incurred in a skiing accident in Utah. Who was at fault? That is the question.

The accident occurred in 2016, and Sanderson claimed it caused brain damage that actually significantly changed his personality, transforming him from an energetic, outgoing person to a nervous, twitchy, evidently depressed one. There’s absolutely no evidence, besides two guys who say they saw the aftermath of the crash and medical evidence that injuries were indeed inflicted. There’s a he-said, she-said oppositional kind of storytelling as to who is at fault, which is mirrored by the two clashing witnesses. Nothing is clear, and there’s no definite answer as to what happened,

Cameras were allowed in the courtroom; every minute was recorded. A cut-and-dried, ready-to-run pop culture documentary with the trappings of true crime and courtroom drama. So how do you mess that up?

Here’s the problem: the documentary assumes that we give a shit. Or, more accurately, that we are transfixed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s legal troubles. This is an absurd media circus to begin with. But the series discusses the case with the gravity and the aggressive melodrama that belongs more justly to a serial killer documentary. This might have the hook of a David-and-Goliath media-storm saga, but seriously? This is Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski accident, not Watergate. Terry Sanderson suffered a traumatic brain injury, and Gwyneth Paltrow had some role in it, but I’ve watched a few murder-cult docs this year that don’t make as much of a to-do over the impact of the case.

The reality of the trial’s popularity is the entire basis for this documentary, but there’s no point in taking the drama to that extreme. By all means, take Sanderson’s injury with seriousness. But questions like “Were you planning on skiing the whole day? Even after lunch?” framed in the way one might ask “Where were you on the night of your wife’s murder?” is just ludicrous.

And still, even with its self-serious drama, it’s incredibly boring. Like, painfully boring.

It is, however, genuinely funny that almost no one says simply “Gwyneth” or “Paltrow” when referring to the defendant, but always “Gwyneth Paltrow.”

This docuseries is a yawning sinkhole for your time and your brain power. But I hear there’s a musical version which is probably honestly more on tone. And almost certainly more fun.