Curious Jeff: Goldblum Show Finds Facts but Loses Audience

Shoes. Ice Cream. Tattoos. Denim. Coffee. Cosmetics. What is the story behind simple things that cause us so much enjoyment? These are the questions Jeff Goldblum poses in his Disney+ series The World According to Jeff Goldblum, produced by National Geographic and Nutopia.

While the concept may be simple, the product is a confusing mess. It’s like watching the scattered mind of David Letterman when he became obsessed with a gag that didn’t quite work but he found humor in it anyway because it was funny to him. But watching Goldblum obsess about a topic is considerably less funny and it’s borderline pointless.

Yes, it’s a documentary. But whether documentary or comedy or drama or animated show–if there’s a TV show with a problem it almost always comes down to the same issue: the audience. This show doesn’t seem to know who its audience is or have an audience in mind when it was created and filmed.

It’s not quite funny enough to be comical and it’s not quite educational enough to teach your kids much. You learn a lot more from the “crash course” videos on YouTube about literature or politics or science. And they’re far more engaging and entertaining.

So who the heck is this for? 

Other than die-hard Jeff Goldblum fans, I’m not sure. And I don’t think National Geographic knows either.

Even the marketing and press pages at Disney+ really are low-key here: they don’t promise it to be educational and they don’t really call it comedic. The show promises to cover “the how, the now, and the why” of the people and things connected to the episode’s topic. We are meant to follow Goldblum on a “curious journey.”

Yes, the content itself is vaguely interesting, but it works better when it appeals to a sense of nostalgia more than the viewer’s natural sense of curiosity. For example, the “ice cream” episode spent a lot of time circling back to the motif that there’s something about ice cream that reminds us of memories of home. And growing up. We hear that from a Las Vegas ice cream truck vendor who takes us to a food festival and we hear that from ice cream entrepreneurs Ben and Jerry, who take us to New England to discuss their creative process. We eventually end up on a naval aircraft carrier, where ice cream socials have taken place for decades. 

But for both the grown up TV critic and a few children in the room watching the show, the most interesting part was the two minutes or so in the middle where they talked about the history of ice cream. The actual documentary or educational segment was less than two minutes. It included interesting on-screen graphics (that was indeed very crash course video-like in its animation-style, word-heavy format) and then it quickly ended and we returned to randomly picking a random location that had ice cream and talking to someone. Okay.

The pilot episode (which took us to shoe factories, shoe designers, and a shoe convention) did precisely the exact same thing. It also had a less-than-two minute segment in the middle that provided all of the history and then awkwardly, with no transition, took us back to a new location in America today. 

If you like Jeff Goldblum, you’ll like it a lot more. But the sad news about The World According to Jeff Goldblum is that it seems more like a time filler. While Goldblum may be deeply curious about these things, I felt more curious about the other programs on Disney Plus that I wasn’t watching because I was instead staring at a man going on a journey to discover that ice cream and shoes … existed. Which is something I already knew. And at the end of the day, it made me yearn for the Jeff Goldblum classic movies, Independence Day and Jurassic Park. Which, of course, are not on Disney+.