ABSTRACT
Travel documentaries are a staple of traditional broadcast television. However, the possibility of streaming audio-visual content online has altered the ways in which television is produced, accessed and watched. This chapter looks at two first-person narrative travel documentary programmes made for streaming, Dark Tourist (2018) and Jack Whitehall: Travels with My Father (2017–2020), and how these programmes are made available on the streaming platform Netflix. By examining the online library that offers these travel programmes, the chapter shows how static boundaries of genre and factuality are destabilised when media products are juxtaposed within a digital environment. Here, the changing media constellations inherent to on-demand viewing encourage the conceptualisation of Netflix as a paratext. In so doing, the chapter shows how Netflix-as-paratext affords specific ways of reception that are anchored within affective visualisation, rather than within generic categorisations of fact and fiction.
