Jay-Z in 8 review – the rapper’s interminable interview show should have been a podcast — SkimNews
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- Mubi released 'Jay-Z in 8,' an eight-episode black-and-white docuseries directed by and featuring superproducer Rick Rubin interviewing Jay-Z to mark 30 years of his music career
- Rick Rubin makes his directorial debut, but the review characterizes the result as 'pure excess' — the high-budget visual treatment works against the stripped-down podcast-style conversations
- The series has no narrative or thematic structure, with conversations swinging freely between anecdotes about collaborators like Notorious B.I.G. and Jaz-O, his Marcy Projects upbringing, and lyric explanations
- Rubin's terse interview style contrasts sharply with journalists like David Letterman; after listening to a Jay-Z song, Rubin offers 'I don't know how you did that' rather than a substantive follow-up
- Jay-Z's line-by-line lyric breakdowns — such as explaining that 'no cap' means 'you're not lying' and 'hit' means 'kill' — create filler moments that alienate casual viewers while boring dedicated fans
- The reviewer argues the show 'would work a lot better' as a podcast that listeners could pause to Google references rather than committing to long, unstructured TV episodes
Why it matters: For Mubi, a prestige platform built on curated cinema, commissioning an overlong, unstructured docuseries burns high production value on a format better suited to audio — the reviewer's core critique is that the same eight hours of conversation would land harder in a medium listeners can pause.
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