Summary
Call Her Alex serviceably chronicles the rise of a zilennial icon, but often finds its focus wavering in the wrong places.
The important thing to understand about Call Her Alex is that its subject, Alex Cooper, is much more interesting than the docuseries itself. After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, the two-parter helmed by Peabody Award-nominated director Ry Russo-Young streams on Hulu, where it often misses the point of how a zilennial icon was formed in the cultural crosswinds of a nascent podcasting medium, gender expectations, systemic injustice, and the raw, relatable energy of unfiltered college girl locker-room talk being given mainstream voice.
And if nothing else, Alex Cooper is mainstream. It might not seem like it if you’re of a certain age – perhaps especially not if you’re male – but her podcast, Call Her Daddy, which was initially propped up by Barstool Sports, was and remains an evolving mega-hit, one of the most popular podcasts ever among women in general and a kind of rite of passage mandatory listen for young women particularly. You can tell from the enthusiasm and general makeup of the crowds lining up outside venues for “The Unwell Tour”, Cooper’s first live tour, around which the bulk of the two episodes revolves.
And this turns out to be a mistake. Not a crippling one, to be fair, but one that highlights how Call Her Alex has a tendency to lend focus to the least interesting aspects of Cooper’s rise to stardom. As a behind-the-scenes featurette exploring the last-minute production woes of a hastily cobbled-together live show, it’s fine but totally indistinctive. But about midway through Episode 1, the focus and the tone shift to a much more engaging personal story that helps to justify Cooper’s relentless determination to have her voice heard, and you wonder why the whole thing hasn’t been about these more formative moments instead of pre-show anxiety post-global success.
The backstage rehearsal sequences are, admittedly, interspersed with interviews with Cooper’s husband and business partner Matt Kaplan, and her parents, including her father, Bryan Cooper, whose job as the producer for the hometown hockey league ignited his daughter’s long-time fascination with expressing herself on camera. Home video footage is included, a lot of it meant to reiterate this near-obsession with performance, and some of it to highlight how young, red-headed, brace-wearing Cooper was bullied at school for being undesirable. You can see already how these things sculpted the persona of someone who would eventually find success on a raunchy X-rated podcast, even if the attention keeps annoyingly returning to the tour’s production woes.
Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan in Call Her Alex | Image via Hulu
Call Her Alex really kicks into gear when Cooper recounts her experiences at Boston University, where she played Division 1 soccer on a full scholarship but had her athletic ambitions derailed by a years-long sexual harassment campaign perpetrated by her coach, Nancy Feldman. This is the most attention-grabbing and headline-making revelation of the docuseries, but on pure storytelling terms it’s also the most involving, from the unusual dynamics of a female athlete being harassed by a female coach to the systemic injustices of Cooper fearing for her scholarship if she didn’t endure the abuses and the university ultimately – and predictably – deciding to protect Feldman at the expense of Cooper’s athletic career. Her determination to make a living on the strength of her voice after this experience makes considerably more sense.
And Episode 2, the better of the two by a margin, benefits from this context. With the live tour shenanigans out of the way, the focus instead turns to Call Her Daddy and the very precise cultural and professional circumstances that allowed it to flourish. From Barstool to highly lucrative deals with Spotify and Sirius XM, to the evolution of the show from Cooper and her then-roommate Sofia Franklyn recording from their couch to Cooper interviewing a diverse range of high-profile guests, the podcast’s evolution feels deserved, organic, and fascinating. There’s something about an earnest pet project morphing over time into a culture-shaping phenomenon – transitioning from deliberately apolitical to politically vital – that gives a docuseries like this a built-in structure and underdog spirit.
But this doesn’t change the fact that as a docuseries, Call Her Alex is unremarkable. The dimensions of it almost feel, in a weird way, like they’re incapable of containing the Alex Cooper story, forced instead to reduce it to simplistic checklist moments that can be ticked off along the way. It’s a bit of a shame that the story of someone defined by their brazen honesty and unconventional rise to fame has been recounted in such a conventional way. But as an explainer of why Cooper became and remains a phenomenon, it undeniably does the job.
