Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stories Of A Generation – With Pope Francis’ On Netflix, Where The Pontiff Presents The Stories Of Remarkable People Over 70

More than any of his recent predecessors, Pope Francis has done a good job at humanizing the position of pontiff. He’s humble, he has a sense of humor, and he tries to use his position to actively help those less fortunate. But we never thought he’d be the host of a Netflix docuseries, but the end of 2021 has made that notion a reality. 

STORIES OF A GENERATION – WITH POPE FRANCIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “VATICAN CITY.” Pope Francis walks into a room where a camera crew and lights are set up, greets everyone, and sits to be interviewed for the show.

The Gist: Stories Of A Generation – With Pope Francis is based on the current pontiff’s book Sharing The Wisdom of Time and produced by Stand By Me Productions. It’s a collection of segments where filmmakers under 30 talk to people over 70 about their extraordinary and inspiring lives.

The episodes are theme-based, and the first one is “Love.” As each story is told, the Pope talks about what he thinks love is about, whether it’s romantic love or love of a parent for a child. For instance, love is play; he feels that playing with your kids is where love is shown. A parent also just doesn’t become a parent when they have a child; they become a parent when they impart their influence on a child to help them grow and develop as a person.

Among those profiled is Martin Scorsese, who is in Oklahoma on a movie shoot (Killers Of The Flower Moon!). His 22-year-old daughter Francesca talks to him about how he met his current wife, Helen Morris, late in life, and how he regrets having work come before taking care of Francesca’s older half-sisters. Jane Goodall is also profiled; she talks about how her methods of communicating to chimpanzees were frowned upon by the scientific community, even though they were some of the most effective methods of the time.

Also profiled: Estela Barnes de Carlotto, whose oldest daughter was kidnapped by Argentinian pro-fascism supporters in the 1970s and killed after giving birth to a son who was taken; Vito Fiorino, who helped rescue refugees drowning off the coast of Lampedusa, Italy in 2013; and Cristina and Carlos Solis, who have found a bond late in life by embracing the tango.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It’s hard to pin down what Stories Of A Generation reminds us of. Yes, there have been documentaries about inspiring seniors — Young@Heart comes to mind — but none hosted by the Pope.

Our Take: Stories Of A Generation – With Pope Francis isn’t designed to be controversial, and it’s not designed to surprise. It’s designed purely to inspire. It does that job quite well. But what it really does is give Pope Francis as big a platform as we’ve seen to show his humanity, something that’s he’s tried to do since he ascended to the papacy in 2013.

Sure, his interstitials were full of observations that the more cynical among us (and we count ourselves in that category) may scoff at. “What does the Pope know about romantic love or about parenthood?” we asked ourselves. But priests the world over have been advising parents and couples for millennia, so their experience can be gleaned over decades of supporting parishioners. So if we take that at face value, the cynicism goes away a bit.

But in other segments, Francis talks about his grandmother, and how he used to tango all the time, and he talks about how Scorsese only wanted him to bless his wife when they met a few years ago, given that she was starting a physical decline that continues today. “This deserves more awards than his films, which are excellent,” he says. So… the Pope has seen Scorsese’s films? Did he watch The Last Temptation of Christ? Is he a Goodfellas fan? Just hearing him say he’s a fan of the director’s films makes us curious to see a docuseries about the Pope’s favorite movies.

The profiles themselves could have benefitted from being less segmented than they were; director Simona Ercolani decided to intercut between the segments throughout an episode rather than do one profile at a time. And while starting out of the gate with Scorsese might have been calculated to grab American audiences, his story wasn’t nearly as inspirational as de Carlotto, who started a group of mothers who went through the tragedies she did, or Fiorino, who considers some of the children he rescued to be family and keeps in close touch with them. We love Scorsese, too, but his work pales in importance compared to many of the others profiled in this series.

Sex and Skin: None. We did mention that the pope hosts this show, right?

Parting Shot: Francis teases the next episode, which is about “Dreams.” He calls a person who doesn’t dream “a sterile person. And sterility is fine for operating rooms, but not for life.”

Sleeper Star: Yes, we’re making Pope Francis the sleeper star, for the reasons we stated above. We’re still imagining him with a bowl of popcorn streaming all 3.5 hours of The Irishman in the Sistine Chapel.

Most Pilot-y Line: We might have wanted to hear from Scorsese’s other daughters, but we never got that chance.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Stories Of A Generation – With Pope Francis isn’t designed to blow you away with twists and turns, but the stories are inspirational, the cinematography is stunning, and the glimpses we get into the pontiff’s humanity are more than enough to watch show when you have a free hour here and there.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Stories Of A Generation - With Pope Francis On Netflix