Jesko considers broadcast legend in documentary ‘Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything’

Cinema | July 15th, 2025

By Greg Carlson

With “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything,” director Jackie Jesko takes on the legacy and legend of the late journalist extraordinaire. One of the year’s many solid, feature-length biographical documentaries, Jesko’s movie premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June before making its way to Hulu. The director highlights career accomplishments and off-camera alliances, avoiding total hagiography by looking at a handful of the transactional relationships that Walters maintained as a power player in the monied circles of NYC’s elite. Jesko also recognizes the enormous influence of Walters on subsequent generations of women (and men) in journalism, laying out her subject’s formidable ability to shatter one glass ceiling after another.

In several significant ways, the rise of Walters as covered by Jesko in the first half of the documentary invites viewers to take a rooting interest in the indomitable newshound. Initially assigned to “women’s stories” at NBC’s “The Today Show” when gender boundaries were ruthlessly defined and fiercely defended by the white men in front of and behind the cameras, Walters (who died in 2022 at the age of 93) narrates key milestones culled from archival material. It will come as little surprise that a number of potent male anchors and co-workers bullied and/or dismissed Walters, seriously underestimating the resolve, grit and rhinoceros-thick skin required in a workplace rampant with misogyny.

Walters spent more than a decade at “Today” before something akin to fate intervened; host Frank McGee (one of many men who treated Walters with contempt) died of cancer. As a result — thanks to language in her contract — Walters became the first woman to co-host the show. Jesko draws clear lines from one big achievement to the next, even if the feature-length format requires skipping past lots of details. Once Walters was hired with a record-breaking contract to co-headline the “ABC Evening News” with Harry Reasoner, Jesko closes in on the juiciest and most satisfying stretch of her subject’s professional life: the transformative influence of the frequent exclusives Walters landed with show business celebrities and world leaders.

And not just run-of-the-mill interviews, either. Walters fine-tuned the hardball like a major league flamethrower, dazzling fans with an ability to earn trust and still cause jaws to drop with the audacity of some questions (Jesko opens the movie with a fantastic montage of Walters zingers). For decades, we ate it up and asked for more. But whether we realized it or not, Walters was contributing to, if not shaping, the fame-obsessed culture that would undergo another technological (r)evolution when the internet arrived. As a biography attempting to cover a big life, it is probably too much to ask Jesko to carve out enough time for a deep dive on the extent to which Walters weakened her industry by blurring and mixing entertainment and news.

Behind the scenes, Walters would struggle to sustain a healthy relationship with her daughter Jacqueline, although the movie delivers the memoir’s happy ending. Additionally, more than one voice in the documentary alludes to a wobbly moral compass that saw Walters in allyship with unsavory types like Roy Cohn (who assisted her father Lou Walters, a colorful figure in his own right). Jesko touches on many romances, but comes to the common conclusion: making television was the true love of Barbara Walters’ life. Anyone with even a mild interest in the glory years of the networks should make an appointment with this story.

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