WASHINGTON POST: What we learned from the first two episodes of Taylor Swift’s The End Of An Era docuseries

In the first episode of Taylor Swift’s new docuseries, the cameras follow her backstage while she’s dressed in one of the sparkly costumes that she wore on her blockbuster Eras Tour. Just minutes before she is about to perform to London’s sold-out Wembley Stadium, the pop superstar stops in an area with a small sofa, where she sits down and cries.

Her mother, also in tears, approaches with a tissue. “I know you helped them,” Andrea Swift says. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I know you helped them.”

The moment was filmed right after Swift met privately with survivors and families of the victims of horrific violence weeks earlier in Southport, England, when a 17-year-old boy stormed a Taylor Swift-themed dance class with a knife and killed three little girls.

Days after the attack, Swift had to cancel shows in Vienna when police arrested men accused of plotting a terrorist attack at the concert site.

“From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal a lot of the time,” Swift says in a voice-over. “But it’s my job to kind of be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform.

That’s just the way it’s got to be.” Soon, she’s onstage beaming to the tens of thousands of ecstatic fans in the audience, who scream and sing along to every word.

It’s common knowledge that the 2023-24 Eras Tour was a phenomenon. The highest-grossing concert tour in history earned more than $2 billion, boosting local economies in every city Swift visited across a two-year, 149-show trek around the globe.

So it’s telling that producers included a reminder of her behind-the-scenes devastation so early in “The End of an Era,” a six-episode documentary about the making of the tour that debuted on Disney+ on Friday.

Despite the fact that her job requires her to get onstage and provide an escape from reality for millions of people, the horrors of real life affect her, too.

The series marks the first time that Swift has spoken publicly about the tragedy in Southport or the events in Vienna. She released written statements when both occurred and said that fan safety was her priority.

And yet, her celebrity status calls for an isolation that few others can understand. Before Swift met with the Southport families at the show, the cameras showed that she sat down with her longtime friend Ed Sheeran, whom she had recruited to surprise the audience at that night’s concert with a duet.

Swift was struggling with nerves after the canceled Vienna shows, and she had a two-month break after her London performances.

“I’m just going to go somewhere no one can find me. I just don’t want to be tracked like an animal. I just have felt, like, very hunted lately,” Swift said.

“I feel like people have forgot that, like, you’re a human being amongst this as well,” Sheeran said.

“100 per cent,” Swift agreed. After the show, she couldn’t completely relax until her tour manager Robert Allen assured her that “nothing bad” happened while she was onstage.

Swift has highlighted this idea throughout her career and continued to do so in the docuseries, which is otherwise mostly focused on her delighted audiences and the backstage mechanics of pulling off the concerts.

Here are some of other takeaways from the first two episodes. (The next four episodes air in two-part installments on December 19 and 26, respectively.)

Even Swift and her crew are still trying to articulate what made the Eras Tour such a phenomenon.

Swift explains that she came up with the idea for the tour after two “unpleasant” experiences: The sale of her master recordings to record exec Scooter Braun (whose name she avoids uttering), which prompted her decision to rerecord her first six albums, planting the seed to celebrate her past work (“I feel like I’m reading my old diaries, thinking about all the different girls I was until I was this one”); and the pandemic that canceled her planned 2020 concerts, which she knew left pent-up demand for live shows.

Still, the singer says she was taken aback by the level of interest. We see brief clips of news footage about the “chaos” of fans trying to get tickets, though no mention of how the frenzy fuelled a congressional inquiry into the entertainment ticketing industry.

Swift and her team attempt to explain what made the Eras Tour stand out. “It’s just a show, it’s just music, but there’s something more profound going on here,” says Amos Heller, her bass player since 2007.

Swift’s theory credits a discography that spans bubbly pop songs and emotionally despairing ballads: “Life contains multitudes, and we’re kind of exploring all of the dramatic edges of those things — that’s what might be unlocking feelings of joy, feelings of euphoria.”

The effort to bring the tour together was overwhelming.

The first two episodes offer glimpses of what it takes to mount a major stadium show: the early sketches of the stage, the sticky notes with all of her songs, the costume designs, the hundreds of crew members.

Swift says she started physically training about six months before rehearsals started, while her band and dancers spent weeks learning the music and choreography.

Then they all had to learn a new set when Swift added a new segment to the show, reflecting her “Tortured Poets Department” album release, as well as choreography for a special one-off performance when Florence Welch joined her in London to sing “Florida!!!”

At one point, an employee tells Swift that some of the “audio guys” got tattoos commemorating the tour. Swift asks why they incorporated an image of the Grim Reaper. Because the shows “almost killed them,” her mother suggests.

Her crew was well compensated.

Stories leaked out about Swift giving millions in bonuses to tour personnel, including $100,000 to each truck driver. The series shows Swift writing personalised thank-you notes with a wax-sealed envelopes.

We see her thanking her backup dancers. One of them — fan favorite Kameron Saunders — is asked to read aloud a poem that would appear in everyone’s envelopes.

“We’ve travelled the world like we set out to do. We dazzled the crowd but we’ve missed family too. My full gratitude doesn’t come from a bank. But here is [bleep] just to say thanks. Love, Taylor.”

Viewers don’t get to hear the bleeped amount, but given the stunned gasps and the number of dancers who broke down crying, it appeared to be quite a bit of money.

Travis Kelce is Swift’s No. 1 hype man.

Fans finally got a look at Swift’s relationship with her fiancé, Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, when she appeared on his podcast in August; during the two-hour episode, Kelce hyped Swift every chance he got, calling her the world’s greatest songwriter.

Now, in one scene, we watch Swift in a car on the way to Wembley when she gets a call from Kelce, headed to football practice. He expresses astonishment that she and Sheeran were going to quickly rehearse a medley before performing it for tens of thousands of people.

“I don’t know. How do you remember 36,000 plays that are whole tactical missions and then just go do it?” Swift says. “It’s the same.”

There are still a lot of unanswered questions.

Swifties had high hopes that this series would answer their burning questions: Why didn’t Swift include her debut album as one of her “eras”? Why was there only one song from the Speak Now album? Do her beloved pet cats really travel with her to every location?

So far, the docuseries seems focused on the second half of the tour rather than the lead-up, which might answer some of those questions … but at least fans can now know what it looked like inside the fake cleaning cart in which Swift was transported to the stage each night.

© 2025, The Washington Post