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Swifties had long guessed that there would be a documentary going behind the scenes of Taylor Swift’s blockbuster Eras tour. The 2023 Eras Tour concert movie didn’t show any of the inner workings of this three-and-a-half-hour behemoth, which ran for 149 dates from 2023-24. Fans put some bits together, such as how Swift arrived on stage being pushed inside a cleaning cart. Plus, given the two albums she wrote during and about the Eras tour – 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department and this year’s The Life of a Showgirl – it wouldn’t be Swiftian to overlook another lucrative IP extension.
What fans could never have imagined was that Disney was set to start filming as the Eras tour was due to hit Vienna on 8 August 2023 – the first of three shows in the Austrian capital that were cancelled owing to an Islamic State terrorist plot. We learn this in episode one of the six-part docuseries The End of an Era, when Swift and her longtime friend Ed Sheeran are backstage at Wembley, hours before he guests at her first concert after the thwarted attack. “I didn’t even get to go,” Swift tells him of Vienna. “I was on the plane headed there. I just need to do this show and re-remember the joy of it because I’m a little bit just like …” She can’t find the words.
These are the biggest revelations of the first two episodes. The series begins by reiterating the now very familiar storylines around the tour: it was motivated by Swift having her master recordings sold without being given the option to buy them outright – and the pandemic. There was the Ticketmaster frenzy, Swiftonomics, friendship bracelets, Swifties causing seismic wobbles from their jumping. “I thought this would be a tour I was very proud of,” Swift says. “It’s more than a tour, it’s a force to be reckoned with in global culture. So never did I think we would have a terrorist plot.”
We see Swift in her London hotel room in mid-August – not just post-Vienna, but also just weeks after the Southport attack where three girls were murdered while attending a Swift-themed summer holiday dance class. Visibly distressed, she tries to explain the situation. “We dodged, like, a massacre situation? And so I’ve just been kind of all over the place. There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, and it was little kids that …” She can’t stop herself crying. “I can’t even explain it,” she whispers.
Before that night’s Wembley show, she says as she wipes her eyes, she’s going to meet the victims’ families backstage. “It’s gonna be fine because when I meet them I’m not gonna do this” – cry – “I swear to God. I’m gonna be smiley.”
That’s what it means to be a performer, she says. You get all your emotion out before going on stage, so that like a pilot, you can calmly steer the crowd through their night. “Keep your seatbelts fastened and welcome to the Eras tour,” she deadpans. You don’t see her meeting the families, of course, but afterwards, you see her sobbing, being consoled by her mother, Andrea, as Swift simultaneously dabs off the professionally applied mascara pooling under her eyes. It is impossible not to feel her pain, and the horror of these atrocities, particularly when, as this documentary reiterates, Eras was meant to be about working your nuts off to deliver joy to – in total – 10 million ecstatic fans. When she runs off stage that night at Wembley, she immediately asks her dad, Scott: “Did anything bad happen that I don’t know about?”
Since Swift released The Life of a Showgirl in October, the critical tide has turned against her (though not the commercial one – it’s the year’s biggest album). Critics found her 12th album vengeful, insubstantial and thinly written; her public appearances have felt stage-managed and hollow. The End of an Era doesn’t provide a ton of revelations beyond Vienna. You spot that she has saved her fiance, Travis Kelce, in her phone with red heart emojis after his name – cute – and get an insight into how secretive the rehearsals were. Dancers had to learn the choreography to the new Tortured Poets section, debuted in Paris in spring 2024, to a click track, because she couldn’t risk the unreleased music getting leaked. (A new version of the concert film featuring this section, The Final Show, also debuts on Friday on Disney+.) We hear a lot about how impossible a feat Eras was to pull off. At this point, you’d be a fool to expect too much more from her. But getting to see Swift at work without her public face on is a well-timed reminder of why her fans connect with her so deeply.
She is, endearingly, an absolute maniac about her craft: spilling over with ideas for staging in a way that reveals how she envisages a whole world when she writes, apparently genuinely concerned that fans might complain about the new Tortured Poets bit. Where that level of command could easily create a tyrant, she seems like a lovely boss: personally involved with her dancers, musicians and crew, bigging them up in heartfelt pre-show huddles, in awe of their commitment, deferring to them as the highest talents in their fields.
“This is a team of experts and something about that keeps me in my element,” Swift says when they rehearse new, last-minute moves for a guest spot from Florence + the Machine for the final night in London. “That kind of pressure is a privilege ’cause they’re not messing up, so it better not be me!” Maybe you could be cynical about footage of her giving them all huge bonuses, but this is life-changing money and a good example for her peers. “Setting a precedent with the Eras tour is really important to me,” Swift says backstage as she seals each personally written note with wax.
As for the final four episodes, we’ll probably get insight into her evolving romance with Kelce, perhaps skipping over the end of her six-year relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn just weeks into the tour’s first run – and almost definitely eliding the subsequent fling with the 1975’s Matty Healy that inspired Tortured Poets. It would be great to learn more about the mentality you need to run a show like this: “From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal sometimes,” she says. Given that the tour was ongoing during the 2024 US election, when she endorsed Kamala Harris, you wonder if she’ll go into politics, a topic she largely avoids these days. But, call me sentimental, the footage of girls, especially those the age of the Southport victims, flinging themselves around without a shred of self-consciousness says as much about the point of all this as the Eras masterminds could ever spill.
