PickVidsBest Documentaries & storytelling Videos
The 202 Documentaries & storytelling videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 4 introductory, 0 intermediate, 198 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a documentary. What they share is that the people and the sequence of events are put back before anyone argues. Channels you will keep seeing include Tom Scott, Mark Rober, BobbyBroccoli.
The History of Tetris World Records
Summoning Salt's roughly two-hour documentary traces the history of Tetris world records, from early play through the modern competitive scene.
Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century
A 1996 documentary on the twentieth-century American decline of public transport and the role of car companies and the highway lobby in it.
Lake Peigneur Drilling Accident
A short documentary about the 1980 Lake Peigneur accident in Louisiana, where an oil rig drilled into a salt mine beneath the lake.
The Three Rocketeers-2012:BBC-Future of Space trav
A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine.
Single Point of Failure: The (Fictional) Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords
Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account.
Plastic Wars (full documentary) | FRONTLINE
A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse.
Douglas Adams - Hyperland
Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by and starring Douglas Adams, who tours an imagined future of hypertext and software agents.
Hypernormalisation | Full Documentary | Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary arguing that politicians, financiers and technologists retreated into a simplified, fake version of the world because reality became too complex.
Nuggets
"Nuggets" is a five-minute animated short by Andreas Hykade in which a kiwi bird tastes a golden nugget and keeps chasing the high.
Forgotten wrecks are a time bomb | DW Documentary
DW Documentary on the roughly 6,300 ships sunk in World War II that are now rusting and leaking oil into the seas.
'The True Cost' - Official Trailer
The official trailer for The True Cost, a documentary on the fast fashion industry and who pays for cheap clothing.
THE DUMBEST BOY ALIVE. PRETTY GOOD, EPISODE SIX.
Jon Bois tells the story of a 2008 bodybuilding forum thread in which users spent a weekend arguing over how many days are in a week.
Дворец для Путина. История самой большой взятки
Alexei Navalny's team investigation into a vast palace allegedly built for Putin, including the history of the bribes behind it.
The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century
A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture.
21st Century Jet - Building the Boeing 777 - Full Episode 1
The first episode of the 1996 PBS documentary series on the creation of the Boeing 777.
We Went To North Korea To Get A Haircut
Two Australian YouTubers travel to North Korea and get a haircut while examining how Western media sensationalizes stories about the country.
What Went Wrong in the South Korean Ferry Disaster? | The New Yorker
A New Yorker short documentary about the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, based on the film In the Absence.
Adam Curtis - Oh Dearism
A short Adam Curtis clip on what he calls oh dearism, the habit of news reporting that presents events as a stream of sad, inexplicable happenings.
The odd accent of Tangier VA - American Tongues episode #3
A clip from the documentary American Tongues about the isolated Tangier Island, Virginia, whose dialect is among the most unusual in the US.
How A London Orchestra Broke International Law
12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards.
Guerrilla Public Service 2011
Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway.
BBC How They Dug the Victoria Line
A 39-minute BBC documentary, built from earlier British Transport Films footage, on how the London Underground's Victoria Line was dug in the 1960s.
Forest Man
A short documentary about Jadav Payeng, who since the 1970s has planted a forest larger than Central Park on India's Majuli island, turning barren land into a lush oasis.
Inside a Secret Chinese Bitcoin Mine
Motherboard's 2014 visit to a secretive Bitcoin mining operation in a repurposed factory in Liaoning, China, one of six sites producing about 4,050 bitcoins a month.