There’s never been a tour like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Her two-year run around the world brought out a three-hour emotional exorcism of a show each night, getting bigger as it went along, for an unprecedented level of fan hysteria and ticket demand. So it makes sense that her new documentary series The End of an Era is anything but a standard concert flick. Instead, it follows the whole tour phenomenon, counting down the final months before the last show and capturing all the backstage drama and fan community that gathered around it.
As Taylor said onstage that final night in Vancouver, it was “the most thrilling chapter of my life to date — my beloved Eras Tour.” The six-part series premieres on Disney+ starting tonight, Dec. 12, on the eve of Taylor’s birthday. We saw the first two episodes — just the tip of this iceberg. Here are 13 takeaways from The End of an Era.
It’s the Final Countdown
The doc counts down to the farewell night of the Eras Tour — the ultimate climax for the most mythically gargantuan tour in history. The final show was in Vancouver on Dec. 8, a few days before Taylor’s birthday and almost exactly a year before the series premieres. Taylor refers to the epic run of the tour as “a lifetime within my life.” The End of an Era captures the madness of life on the road for everyone swept up into the Swiftian whirlwind — not just the star, or even just the onstage performers, but the giant community that goes into making this tour go, from the crew to the creative team to her family. —Rob Sheffield
Everybody Is a Star
The doc focuses on the whole tour community, making stars out of the band and the dancers. There’s so much Madonna Truth or Dare energy in the way the whole team becomes part of the story. Taylor’s band is full of musicians who have been at her side for years — fans have been seeing and hearing them for so long, it’s a rare treat to see them finally open up and tell their stories. We all know Amos Heller as the fan-fave bass stud who’s been with Taylor since the early days — there’s hilarious footage of them clowning around on the 2007 tour. He reveals one of his secret pro tips for keeping his musical chops in shape on the road — he practices his bass in the shower, since it’s the one place where he won’t wake up any of the neighbors in the nearby rooms. It’s definitely surreal to see Amos busting out his bass moves in the middle of an empty bathroom when he’s used to stadium stages, but like everything in the documentary, it’s about capturing the gritty day-to-day work that goes into the glamour of those few hours onstage. That’s show biz, baby. — R.S.
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Taylor Opens Up About the Foiled Vienna Terror Plot and Cancelled Shows
The End of an Era doesn’t shy away from the dark side of the spotlight, which makes it a sobering watch. In the first episode, Swift openly discusses the thwarted terror plot that forced the singer to cancel three nights of the Eras Tour in Vienna. (For the unacquainted, Swift has only cancelled a handful of shows in her 20-year career, and one was due to a military coup). “Never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot,” Swift says as she wipes tears from her eyes. “We dodged a massacre,” Swift continues. She then explains how she copes with such life-altering events and continues to push forward to put on a show to millions of fans. “You block it off,” she says, comparing herself to a pilot who needs to reassure everyone that all is well, even when it’s not. — Maya Georgi
Travis Kelce Is a Behind-the-Scenes Cheerleader
Don’t hold your breath, Tayvis Nation. Taylor’s fiancé, Travis Kelce, isn’t as prominent in the first two episodes; he’s more of an off-camera presence. Kelce is only ever heard over the phone in two separate calls. Swift places the first call in the lead-up to her shows in London, clearly in need of some reassurance. She bemoans the fact that Kelce has practice but is still grateful to hear from him. “Some people got a vitamin drip, I got this conversation,” she tells her beau. Once the first show back is a smashing success and Swift is in a van home, she immediately calls Kelce again to share how elated she is at getting through it all. “I can hear it in your voice,” he says. “I’m just so happy to be back doing this,” she tells him. There’s a few moments we hear “baby!” exchanged, but sadly, no “honey.” — M.G.
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Swifties Steal the Show
It didn’t take long for the fan community buzzing around the Eras Tour to take over as the star of the show. Swifties began their own tribal rituals that became part of the tour, after starting out on a strictly organic grass-roots level — most notably, the friendship-bracelet craze. As Taylor told the crowd on that final night in Vancouver, “I never thought that writing ONE line about friendship bracelets would have you guys all making friendship bracelets, making friends, and bringing joy to each other.” There’s something a bit terrifying about the intense Deadhead-like devotion of the Swifties every night — and the singer is as mystified by it as anyone else. On the Eras Tour, the parking lot became a place for fans to hang out, sing along, meet fellow Swifties. As one older observer marvels in the doc, “It’s like Woodstock without the drugs!” — R.S.
The Eras Tour Is Her Autobiography
Nobody knew what Taylor was going to do when she returned to the road. Her Lover Fest performances in the summer of 2020 got cancelled in the pandemic, along with every other tour — on the day Taylor got the news her tour wasn’t happening, she was so miserable she wrote “Mirrorball.” That led to Folklore and Evermore, not to mention — by the time she hit the road for the Eras Tour — Midnights. With this backlog of massive albums she hadn’t performed live, people openly speculated that she might have simply gotten too big to tour at all. The whole idea of this experiment seemed impossible. (As Heller quips, “It seems obvious now, because it did work.”) But Taylor treated the whole show — era to era — as the long and winding tale of her life, growing up in public through her music. As she puts it, the show features “all the different girls I was until I turned into this one.” —R.S.
So Why Didn’t Her Debut Album Get Its Own Era?
Yeah, we still don’t know. Sorry. Some of us are still traumatized by that. —R.S.
There’s a Bestie Jam Session with Ed Sheeran
A sight to warm anyone’s heart: Taylor gives the London crowd in Wembley Stadium a little extra when it’s Surprise Song o’ Clock, with a local boy for a guest. Ed Sheeran was just a folkie kid when he went on the road with Taylor on the Red tour, making massive waves with his solo acoustic sets, blowing up into one of her most wildly successful proteges as well as one of her most enduring and endearing musical friendships. Even Ed, a man who’s been rocking stadiums on his own for years now, seems a little daunted by the size and scale of the Eras Tour. But they sit down backstage to work on their classic Red duet “Everything Has Changed” — a transformative song in both their stories, not to mention the most famous song ever written by two people while bouncing on a trampoline. For both of these superstars, it’s a reunion that’s deeply personal even though they’re sharing it with thousands of fans in realtime, tapping into their shared history — two old friends getting back to where they once belonged. —R.S.
Florence Welch Is a Comedic Genius
Who knew Florence Welch was so funny? As the singer and frontwoman for Florence + the Machine preps for a surprise performance of “Florida!!!” in London, it’s like watching a fairy with impeccable comedic timing. “In my own shows, I just show up and run around,” she says during choreo rehearsals. The best part is when she describes popping up on the Eras Tour stage at showtime. “It was like walking on Mars,” she says. Welch was so out of orbit, she was even awestruck by her friend. “The persona is huge but the person is soft,” she says of Swift. But as soon as she saw the singer in her element, Welch recalls thinking what everyone else in the stadium was thinking: “That’s Taylor fucking Swift!” —M.G.
The Life of a Showgirl Is Insanely Hard
Taylor goes into some of the details of touring — like the way she started her physical training regimen six months before rehearsals even began. In early footage of tour rehearsals, there’s a shot of her practicing the nightly move where she dives through a narrow hole in the stage. (That dive turned so many of us into anxious wrecks every night — it’s still scary to witness when she’s just rehearsing it. Too risky!) It’s a revelation to see how hard everyone has to work just to keep up. As Swift says, “It is our job to make this look accidental, and it is our job to make this look effortless.” We see her downtime rituals, listening to audiobooks (in one scene she’s taking in Liz Moore’s crime novel The God of the Woods). Late in the tour, all the lighting crew get matching tattoos proudly proclaiming their number of shows. Taylor does a double take when she sees it, asking, “Why does it show the Grim Reaper?” Because they’re surprised they even survived it. —R.S.
Kam Saunders Gets His Close-Up
Anyone who went to the Eras Tour, watched livestreams from home, or even tuned into the first concert film, was instantly charmed by lead dancer Kameron Saunders and his various ad-libs (Like ever!) So it’s a delight to watch him describe the arduous journey that brought him to the Eras Tour stage. Saunders opens up about facing discrimination as a black dancer with a larger body and being raised by a single mother, which makes dancing for the historic tour that much more special. “This feels like my Super Bowl,” Saunders says of the Eras Tour in a pointed remark. As fate would have it, Saunders’ brother, Khalen, became a two-time Super Bowl champion with the Kansas City Chiefs alongside none other than Travis Kelce. —M.G.
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Her Choreographers Are Total Rockstars
Two of the doc’s most fascinating characters are the bad-ass dancing queens: choreographer Mandy Moore and associate choreographer Amanda Balen. (Fans got to see both at work in The Life of a Showgirl movie, as part of the team behind the video for “The Fate of Ophelia.”) We get up close and personal as they share their professional stories, from Moore’s work in Hollywood (Swift’s friend Emma Stone urged her to hire Moore after La La Land) to Balen’s career dancing for Janet Jackson, Céline Dion, and Lady Gaga. During one rowdy rehearsal for “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” Taylor announces at top volume, in her snootiest faux-Brit accent, “We are doing theeee-aaaterrrrr!” But even in dance rehearsals, Taylor is constantly jumping into the creative flow. Working on one move, she tells Moore, “I’m seeing this as ‘girl in an insane asylum’-slash-‘wood nymph.’” —R.S.
It’s Her Love Song to the Audience
When Taylor sang “Long Live” on that final night in Vancouver, she changed the key line, “It was the end of a decade” to “it was the end of an era,” and that’s the spirit of this doc. Like the tour itself, it ends up turning into a love song from Swift to the crowd, with her downright scary obsession with making a unique connection with the listeners. “You look out there and it’s not just a blob of lights,” Taylor says in one candid moment. “There’s millions of stories and counter-narratives all colliding in one place where we feel safe to be demonstrative of a whole spectrum of emotion.” That’s the crowd she’s performing for. The Eras Tour is what happens when a one-of-a-kind artist comes face-to-face with a one-of-a-kind audience — not just the people who made it into the room for the Eras Tour, but the ones who followed it from afar, joining in the global community that coalesced around this musical adventure. It’s a project that only Swift — and her fans — could have brought to life. —R.S.
