Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ed Sheeran: The Sum Of It All’ on Disney+, Where The Superstar Singer Takes Work And Life to The Nth Degree

In Ed Sheeran: The Sum of It All (Disney+), the English singer-songwriter adds an additional four-episode docuseries to his mathematics-themed run of five albums, which began with + in 2011 and culminates with –, released this month. This guy moves major units. He sells out arenas worldwide. He’s got Grammys. And when he’s being sued over whether he stole the elements of a song from Marvin Gaye, he brings his guitar to the courtroom to help plead his innocence. But who is Ed Sheeran, really? Over its four 30-ish minute episodes, The Sum of It All endeavors to find out.

ED SHEERAN: THE SUM OF IT ALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Hey look, it’s toddler Ed Sheeran, ginger-haired, wearing glasses, and making an earnest point to his off camera parents. Smash cut to the present. “I’m specky, ginger hair, really short,” Sheeran says in reflection, in a giant arena during a break after soundcheck. “Like, English. From the countryside. Who stutters and beat boxes. That guy doesn’t become a pop star.” 

The Gist: And yet, that’s exactly what happened. “There was no faffing,” Sheeran says in The Sum of It All about the time back in 2011, when his first single “The A Team” blew up, he was promptly signed to a record deal, and his debut album became a hit. Suddenly he wasn’t hustling to play three pub shows in a night, shuttling between London gigs on the Tube and hauling a backpack with his loop pedal and a stack of burned CDs. And with the release of his second and third albums, he went on to play the stages of Wembley and Glastonbury in the UK, Helsinki, São Paulo, and 40 other cities around the world. In Sum, Sheeran turns to the camera after singing “A Team” to a  teeming crowd of thousands in Zurich, Switzerland. “I remember, like, no one in a room listening to that. It’s crazy having this, every night.”

Sum looks in on that early version of Sheeran, when he was still on the DIY grind, with bits of iPhone footage from chaotic club gigs and original material he contributed to SBTV, an online video channel operated by Jamal Edwards, who became a close friend. (Edwards’ 2022 death is a topic of the second episode of the docuseries, entitled “Loss.”) It also connects the hopeful young Sheeran with the (still young) Sheeran of today, who says his determination to always do more than his musical peers was a key to his success. He also can’t resist a “told you so” jab at the record companies who turned down signing him.    

What’s most illuminating here is Ed Sheeran’s relationship with his wife, Cherry Seaborn. They were childhood friends, and knew each other from school. But they reconnected later, were soon engaged, and got married in 2019. A daughter, Lyra, was born in 2020, and Jupiter followed in 2022. Sheeran and Seaborn both speak to the dynamic they share, as they balance their different professional lives against personal time – “Remembering that we fancy each other,” as Ed puts it – and raising their daughters on a 16-acre estate in Suffolk. But that dynamic was tested when a health scare threatened not only Cherry’s life, but that of their oldest daughter.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The list of “Himself” cameos Ed Sheeran has made on screen includes an appearance in the 2019 film Yesterday and his surfacing in a 2017 episode of Game of Thrones, the latter of which he’s had some trouble living down. And while Sheeran and Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi share a certain kind of songcraft DNA, they’re also pals in real life. Capaldi name checks Sheeran in How I’m Feeling Now, his own recent documentary, and the two have sustained a bit of playful bickering in the media over the state of a country house Lewis purchased on the advice of Ed.

Our Take: You wouldn’t know it from the concert footage in The Sum of It All, where the fans who have poured into arenas worldwide to tearfully sing the lyrics of “Shape of You,” “The A Team,” and “Perfect” along with this young guy with glasses and tousled red hair, his trusty acoustic guitar, and a loop pedal. But Ed Sheeran’s success has been polarizing. Twitter burns with commentary about how the world does not have to hand it to him, and don’t get the haters started on his dabbling in rap. But whatever you think of Ed Sheeran’s folk-pop sound and unabashedly sentimental songwriting, it’s clear that millions of people love it, and Sum is at its best when it reveals the roots of what inserted him into the public consciousness in the first place. Here’s Sheeran in his pre-success hustle days, improvising a folky ramble through 50 Cent’s “In da Club.” (The club he’s actually in goes wild.) And here he is writing his song “Perfect” in tribute to his wife, sending it to her in email, and marveling at the global success it achieved, since to him it was always so personal. Everyone’s got a hot take on Ed Sheeran, good and bad. But Sum of It All proves the validity of his sentiment – we see it emerging from a private place he’s proud of – and that’s really all any songwriter can ever ask for.      

Sex and Skin: Come on now. This is Disney. They even bleep out the obvious swears.

Parting Shot: Sheeran and Seaborn are relaxing by a campfire on their property in Suffolk when the conversation turns serious. She downplays it, but the revelation of his wife’s cancer diagnosis brings Sheeran to tears. Her well being will continue to be a factor as The Sum of It All unfolds across four episodes. 

Sleeper Star: For Ed Sheeran superfans, the biggest revelation in The Sum of It All might be the active participation of Cherry Seaborn, who despite her husband’s notoriety has not made a habit of appearing before the camera. “We had flirted with the idea of flirting,” Seaborn says of their days together in secondary school, and the docuseries also includes an intimate moment where Sheeran serenades her and their unborn daughter with an early version of his song “Welcome to the World.”  

Most Pilot-y Line: “I believe in speaking things into existence,” Sheeran says Sum. “I planned my life to the nth degree. ‘To do it, I need to play all of these gigs, and write all of these songs, and it’ll happen.’ And it did.” But Sheeran isn’t just taking a page out of Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers. He goes on to acknowledge the counterweight to best laid plans, which is the inevitability of unexpected change. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ed Sheeran is a giant star, he’s sold millions of records, and people everywhere have strong opinions about all of that. But The Sum of It All proves adept at upholding one of the best things a music doc can do, which is reveal its subject on a personal level. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges