Diddy

There are relatively few Netflix documentaries – even in this increasingly sensationalized and prurient age – that have made anything like the splash that the new show about the artist formerly known as P. Diddy has caused. Sean Combs: The Reckoning isn’t just hard to watch, but positively mind-blowing in its account of the imprisoned mogul’s actions and predilections. Although he was acquitted of the most serious charges that he was on trial for this year, Combs will not be released from jail until May 2028. Given the number of allegations and civil suits pending against him, any comeback for the disgraced musician looks impossible – even in an era when Kanye West is, apparently, given second chance after second chance.

In the end, the verdict in the most talked-about trial of the year, perhaps the decade, came in far quicker than most commentators had expected. Judge Arun Subramanian had wisely suggested that he wanted a unanimous verdict on the charges that Diddy had been arraigned on and that he wanted this verdict to come in before the 4th of July holiday. Many had assumed, given the sheer weight of evidence against Diddy (real name, as we were informed many times, Sean Combs), that it would take at least a week to sort through the often sordid and distressing material that the jury were presented with over the course of the seven-week trial. In the end, however, it took just over a day of deliberations.