In 2023, thinking about Michael Jackson in any kind of meaningful way is thoroughly depressing. There are the sexual abuse allegations against him, the strange and isolated life he led, the way he died, the grief of the children he left behind, his extraordinary amassing of debts despite a lifetime of success. All of it is sad. So sad, in fact, that sometimes it’s tough to remember the sheer amount of joy that Jackson brought audiences during his early solo career.
In a choice that’s sure to anger some viewers and delight others, Thriller 40, a new documentary from Showtime and Paramount+, willfully sidesteps all of the most discomfiting elements about Jackson. Instead, the film takes us back to that time — roughly 1979 to 1984 — when he was still in the middle of transforming himself into the King of Pop. The biggest challenges Jackson faced back then were escaping the shadow of The Jackson 5, winning as many Grammys as he thought he deserved and dealing with MTV at a time when the channel refused to play videos by Black artists.
That final hurdle is particularly astonishing when one considers the lasting cultural jolt provided by the videos that eventually emerged from 1982’s Thriller album — and just how much they boosted MTV’s audience. (If you ask anyone who was alive in the ’80s where they were when they first saw Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, they can usually tell you. That degree of impact — usually reserved for national tragedies — had never happened before Thriller, and it hasn’t happened on that scale since.)
Thriller 40 explains the infuriating lengths to which Jackson and his team had to go to get his videos played. At one point, Walter Yetnikoff — then group president of CBS Records — threatened to pull all of the label’s artists from the channel if MTV didn’t start playing Jackson. Yetnikoff is heard in the film explaining in voiceover: “I screamed bloody murder when MTV refused to air his videos. They argued that their format, white rock, excluded Michael’s music. I argued that they were racist assholes. I’ve never been more forceful or obnoxious.”
