Documentaries are broadcast twelve times more on French television than 25 years ago, according to a study

With the rise of DTT and the expansion of cable and satellite, documentaries found multiple distribution channels. To the point of being twelve times more exposed than 25 years ago, according to the INA.

They are everywhere, and obviously it’s not going to stop any time soon. The documentary genre has never been so widely broadcast – and in demand – on French television, reveals a study by the National Audiovisual Institute, carried out over two decades. And even the platforms have gotten into it, sometimes with big successes.

Concretely, there were more than 100,000 documentaries broadcast in 2022, a twelve-fold increase since 2000. This increase is due in particular to the arrival of TNT, and channels with high demand for this content such as RMC Discovery for example, but especially the expansion of cable and satellite which favored the creation of thematic channels: Planet, Animals, Travel, All History, Hunting and Fishing, etc. All of these channels are almost 100% documentary and it is essentially these very specific program schedules that drive up the figures.

Moreover, on the historic channels such as TF1, France 2, France 3, France 5, Canal Plus, M6 and Arte, the offer is however in slight decline. Advantage, however, goes to Arte, which broadcast some 6,000 documentaries in 2022, followed by France 5 and its 4,000 dedicated programs. The others are very far behind.

Lots of reruns and mostly male directors

20 years ago, the short format – less than 26 minutes – was the most popular. Today, it still represents 31% of the offer but it is preceded by the intermediate format, between 27 and 52 minutes. The themes of society, nature and wildlife, art and culture, have been the winning trio since 2000 on the historical channels. The classification is different on TNT: daily life, society, discovery.

But be careful, 80% of the documentaries you see on television are actually reruns. For example, The people of the river has been on the public service 113 times since 1989. It is a film about life in a village on the borders of Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. But that does not prevent the appearance of new stories such as docu-reality, the number one genre on TNT. Docufiction, which is rarer, has taken off a little over the last 4-5 years: it is a mixture of reality and fiction.

Finally, in the documentary genre, parity is far from being achieved, notes the INA. Over the last twenty years, three quarters of films broadcast for the first time were made by men. Even if the share of female directors is increasing slightly. As for speaking time in documentaries, it is twice as favorable to men: women are only heard on 31% of a film on average.