Please Please Me | With the Beatles | A Hard Day's Night | Beatles for Sale | Help! | Rubber Soul | Revolver
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | Magical Mystery Tour | The White Album | Yellow Submarine | Abbey Road | Let It Be
Past Masters | The Beatles Anthology | The Beatles: Get Back
- Alternative Character Interpretation: Due to the around 8 hour run time of the series expanding on the actions and motivations greatly from the original film, each of the Beatles (minus Ringo, who's Ringo) become more nuanced in their actions:
- Was Paul actually the domineering control-freak history paints him as? Or is he a man realising that he and his friends are drifting apart and trying to do everything he can to keep them together, even if it only makes things worse? Paul straight up admits to John that he's trying to be the boss like John was in the early days, and his actions (such as his discussion with everyone sans John and Yoko about her presence at the sessions) are often drawn from trying to do what he thinks is the best way to stop them from falling apart but is too headstrong with what he thinks is best to the detriment of the other's ideas.
- Was George really unfairly maligned during these sessions or were the communication problems causing him and Paul to get into useless arguments? He went from the relative freedom of The White Album where he had a bunch of songs present to now being essentially reduced to just the lead guitarist again. However, a bunch of his compositions were tried out during these sessions and the crux of his argument with Paul about how he'll be utilised in the sessions is Paul trying to encourage him to improvise and express himself more while George just wants to know what he should be playing to best help the song. And if he was maligned or not also affects how one sees his quitting halfway through, since those sympathetic to his plight see it as the much needed kick to the behind the rest of the boys needed to get their heads out of their asses while still standing up for himself, but if you think his conflict with Paul is pointless on his part then him leaving can come across as throwing a fit when he didn't get his way.
- John, and especially his insistence on keeping Yoko at the sessions, can also be interpreted in a couple of ways. For the traditional "Yoko broke up the Beatles" crowd Paul's point to how if John was forced to choose between Yoko and the band he would choose Yoko as proof that Yoko was at least a driving factor in the band's tensions that led to them breaking up, while people on the other side of the argument can bring up that Paul's whole point is that it really isn't that big a deal that she's there, and as the sessions go on she actually ends up being fairly helpful, relative to how well the boys handled some situations. And for some additional context
- George bringing Billy Preston to the sessions has always been cast as George doing it to ease tensions in the band. The implication was always that there was a lot of bitter infighting in the group and bringing in an outside performer (who was a liked friend by all) would charm everybody. However, the mood of the band isn't bad in these sessions, the tensions that prompts George to bring in Billy are the band chafing at trying to record the complexity of their latest compositions without dubbing, and that means they need someone on keyboards. It's literally true that bringing in Billy eased tensions, but it's because they needed a fifth man to keep with the promise of not dubbing.
- Awesome Music:
- Yes, it's the Beatles making music, but we get to watch songs like "Get Back", "Let It Be", "I Me Mine", and dozens of others get dreamed up out of thin air. Specifically, Paul strumming up the basic chords and melody of "Get Back" during a five-minute break waiting for John to return.
- Mal Evans whacking a hammer on an anvil for "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".
- Billy Preston enters out of the blue and joins in on the songs the Beatles have been rehearsing for weeks, finding his place in the arrangements seemingly effortlessly and improvising many now-iconic keyboard riffs.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: A number of the "supporting cast" (i.e. the non-Beatles) seem to have made a significant impression on viewers...
- It had been documented elsewhere how Billy Preston getting invited to the Get Back sessions was a big moment keeping the Beatles hanging together as a band, but this documentary displays more of the positive impact Preston made the second he walked into the recording studio, and highlights how much of a spark he provided in a bleak moment.
- Mal Evans, the group's roadie, for his selfless attitude and his infectious positivity. Even when things seem to be at their worst, the guy is nearly always smiling.
- Recording engineer Glyn Johns, for his audacious sartorial choices, his uncanny resemblance to Cillian Murphy, and his prescient apprehension about nominating Allen Klein as manager.
- Depending on whom you ask, plenty of others could be counted here as well, including producer George Martin, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Linda Eastman, Yoko and more.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- Paul's entire reason for organising these sessions is to try and revitalise the spirits of the band in the hopes of coming closer as a band and, more importantly, friends. And while the series shows that these sessions were not the march through misery that the myths about them would suggest, it becomes crystal clear from episode 1 that if the strain that would eventually break up the band could be healed, it wasn't going to be healed by a television special.
- Paul's discussion about what to do with Yoko's presence at the sessions, where he outright states that even if the guys are annoyed with her being there, the absolute last thing they need is to make a big enough stink about it that John chooses Yoko over them when it would be the pettiest reason to break the band up and unfairly paint Yoko as the villain of the Beatles' break-up. It's up to you whether everyone and their mother blaming Yoko for the band's break-up anyway, for the exact reasons Paul brings up, is funny or sad.
- The day after George quits the band, John is conspicuously absent as well (he was off doing an interview), leaving only Paul and Ringo in the studio to contemplate the future of the band. At one point, Paul quips "and then there were two" and the camera hangs on a very long shot of Paul looking like he's holding back tears, then cuts to Ringo looking similarly despondent. As of 2021, Paul and Ringo are the only surviving members of the Beatles, which can turn what was already a tense and miserable scene into an outright Tear Jerker.
- John talking gleefully about his meeting with Allen Klein, who would later become a major point of contention between John, George and Ringo (who wanted Klein to be their manager) and Paul (whose dislike of Klein was later Vindicated by History). It was one of the major factors in the band's breakup. Made even harsher by the fact that Glyn Johns expresses doubts on camera about Klein's character.
- Mal Evans' lengthy scenes with the policemen are very much this trope considering a few years later he was shot dead by police (in LA) following a depressive episode in which supposedly brandished a gun (only for it to turn out to be an air rifle).
- Heartwarming in Hindsight: When discussing a potential venue for the live show after they decide against doing it in the studio lot Paul off-handedly suggests doing it in a farm in Scotland, to which Linda replies to the effect of "Oh, that would be lovely." The couple would eventually spend much of their married life together in Paul's actual little Scottish farm he had, High Park Farm, and by all accounts truly had a lovely time together there.
- Ho Yay: As is the norm for Beatles films—even documentaries, apparently—John is responsible for most of it, such as when he jokingly tells Paul "It's like you and me are lovers." Needless to say, certain sections of the fandom had a field day with these moments.
- Older Than They Think:
- Obviously, having it on pristinely restored film makes for a more vivid and revelatory way to experience the material, but the audio of the rehearsals has long circulated on bootlegs, and was extensively chronicled in the book Drugs, Divorce and a Slipping Image (later reissued as Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles' Let It Be Disaster) by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, so the Alternative Character Interpretations listed above and the way the events affected the band's unity have been popular discussion topics among hardcore Beatles fans for a while. Once crucial difference, however, is that anyone who's read Sulpy and Schweighardt's book knows that they had a very definite intention to depict the sessions as being as miserable as possible (starting with the sensationalistic title of the book), and the way they describe what's going on in the sessions is extremely negative, including much confident speculation about what's going on in the band members' minds. The film refrains from the kind of explicit editorialising that Sulpy and Schweighardt indulged in, and leaves it up to the audience to decide what the band is thinking or feeling at any given moment.
- The dynamic of Paul being the only one in the band enthusiastic about performing live, the major point of contention here, had already factored into the decision to end touring in 1966. The band had taken a vote on whether to keep doing live shows, and "no" won by a 3-1 count with Paul as the holdout. Despite it not being unanimous, Brian Epstein agreed with the decision, and while Paul eventually went along with it, it marked probably the first permanent wedge between him and the other three.
- One-Scene Wonder: Heather, Linda's (and later Paul's) daughter, shows up during one rehearsal. She elevates every single shot she's in just by being a Cheerful Child.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
- Thanks to the passage of time allowing opinions to cool, the other Beatles being open about their own problems at the time, and the series showing that her "meddling" was greatly exaggerated by her haters, Yoko and her time at the sessions has been reevaluated by viewers who now got to experience not only how fairly neutral her effect on the band during this time was, but also see Paul outright state how dumb it would be to break the band up over her "sitting on an amp". Some scenes highlight John being happy that Yoko's there, either resting his head in her lap or dancing with her as the other bandmates perform. Yoko's being there helped John to be there.
- The song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," an otherwise silly tune that ended up on Abbey Road, which John notably disdained as one of Paul's weirder obsessions. When you watch how Mal Evans was tasked with finding the anvil to make the song and the joy he has whacking on it during recording, you can forgive the song just a little bit...
- The Scrappy:
- While it's pretty understandable to some people why they're annoyed, the members of the public interviewed on the street who are incensed that the biggest band in the world is playing brand new music in their first concert in almost three years (and, in hindsight, at what now is known to be their last public performance together, ever, for free as a parting gift to the fans) are not looked at fondly by viewers due to how much they embody quintessential British stuffiness.
- Michael Lindsay-Hogg's seeming obsession on holding the concert in the desert with an audience of "2000 Arabs and Friends with torches", even after the others have told him they don't want to go abroad annoyed some viewers.
- Signature Scene: The scene of Paul, incredibly stressed and tired despite the day not even having started yet, hammering out the main structure and melody of "Get Back" while waiting for John is becoming one. For people in the creative industries, it's a fairly nuanced and relatable depiction of when trying to make art feels like squeezing blood from a stone. And for the people outside those industries, the fact that Paul was able to create the song in spite of these circumstances makes him, and the band as a whole, look better for pulling through all this and making some genuinely great music.
- Tear Jerker: In the first episode, the shot of George glaring right at the camera during Paul's talking him through how a song they're working on should be performed. It's the moment every Beatle fan dreads seeing: The moment he's had it with getting treated as a junior member of the band. Among all the other matters pulling the Beatles apart - the fighting over performing live shows, the fighting over the hiring of a new manager - the fight over George's role in the band that drove him to (temporarily) quit is the one that hurts the fanbase most. It's the fight that broke the fellowship.
