Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019)

Title: Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates 

Year: 2019

Genre: Documentary|

Season: 1|

Runtime: 45 min/episode

Director: Davis Guggenheim

Starring: Alex Bueermann, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates

8,1/10

This is a series that documents the every-day life of a billionaire who lives the privileged life we all want and seeks for. It’s the documentary about Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft and Windows, and who through his technology has provided a new form of behavior in humans life. He’s a genius, and as this is a form of a standard these days, it also shows his engagement to save children’s lives who die of diarrhea. A form of sickness that has been discovered in the southern part of the world where most of the children have more terrible living-condition than most people. This is for real, and the director tries very hard to comply with his narrative and purpose for the whole documentary.  Most of the content through this short series about Bill and his career, it spends a lot of time to tell the story about plumbing and construct new sewage-system for the countries in need.

It also documents on how the condition has worsened by time and Bill Gates tries to save them by designing a new toilet as well.  Combining this narrative about designing a new toilet, it also tells and delves deep on how Bill was as a child on how to understand his mind better. It’s stated clearly during the series run that Bill Gates never stops working. He’s either reading, thinking or attends meetings in a different way. He’s for sure dedicated to share his knowledge and work hard to make this problem disappear.

This ain’t a ground-breaking series. It showcases as well that it doesn’t intend to be that way either. It has the form of narrative that keeps you engage through the short format. It has several simple interviews where you can hear the director’s voice and the shaky camera as well. This short-documentary series has a problem. And as this problem with the sewage-problem, as much it should be told for the audience to understand the critical situation, it takes over the premise as it would be focusing more on Gates. Therefore, it might be a problem to engage fully as this is a shorter documentary-series on Netflix.

As it talks a lot as well about Bill gates career, it gets interesting and provides it as well with a clean dignity that is rear in this storytelling. It feels simple and personal. It’s not that very much on the nose as these types of series might be. It doesn’t have the high-profile we’re so used to see and follow.

It keeps interesting all the way out and even if it lacks in the narrative and the concept where it should be more episodes, it’s one of the more worth-watching series available on the streaming service today.