The news isn’t exactly scintillating. “The continued rise of streaming services, and their need for a constantly renewed library of content, means that informational documentaries will continue to be made. … They demand little of the viewer and are easy to digest, not to mention relatively cheap to produce. But at the same time, in the case of literature, they reduce their subject to a series of outworn clichés, where the lives of all writers begin to resemble each other.”