It doesn’t take long for Taylor Swift’s Disney+ docuseries “The End of an Era” to get emotional. The first of the series’ six episodes quickly opens a window on something that had stayed publicly unseen until now: just how the pop star reacted behind the scenes to the violence and threat of terrorism that cast a pall on the otherwise joyful experience of the European leg of her Eras Tour in 2024.
The debut episode, which premiered at 3 a.m. ET/midnght PT on Friday morning, gets off to a celebratory start. But it does not waste too much time in getting to a mid-episode segment that documents the tour’s darkest hours. In footage shot at the time, Swift is seen shedding tears and sharing profound anxiety in the wake of two terrifying incidents — a thwarted terrorist plot around her Vienna concerts, and a deadly attack on children attending a dance class in Liverpool.
“I thought that this would be a tour I was very proud of. But this is more than a tour,” she says in Episode 1. “It’s a force to be reckoned with in global culture. So never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot.”
The three Vienna concerts slated for August of last year were canceled after Austrian officials arrested two men who had plotted to attack Swift’s fans. As her shows in London went on as scheduled after that, she approached the first of those concerts with far more fear and trepidation than she was about to let on, the episode shows.
“Basically it’s a weird feeling going into these last five shows in Europe because … we’ve done 128 shows so far,” she says in the 2024 footage, “but this is the first one where I feel like I’m skating on thin ice or something. We just had this series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour. We dodged a massacre situation. There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. And it was little kids that, uh…” At this, she trails off, unable to complete the sentence and say that three children died after being assaulted by a knife-wielding attacker.
A messae on screen says that Swift met with survivors of the Liverpool attack before each of the concerts in London. No footage of those meetings is included, but the cameras do catch Swift saying she will stop crying and become stoic in time to meet the families.
“It’s gonna be fine, because when I meet them, I’m not gonna do this. I swear to God, I’m not gonna do this,” she vows. “I’m gonna be smiling.”
Which is an attitude she took into doing the concerts themselves. “Any of this gets out of the way before you ever go upstage. You lock it off for three and a half hours. They don’t have to worry about you. It’s like you’re a pilot flying the plane. And if you were like, ‘Ooh, there’s turbulence up ahead; I don’t know if we’re actually gonna land in Dallas; I’m gonna try hard, but I don’t know if I can actually figure out how to land through this turbulence,’ everyone on the plane’s gonna freak out.” She knows how to navigate a crowd through the friendly skies. “You just have to have a calm, cool, collected tone of, ‘We will be landing in in Dallas at 6:05 p.m. Got a little tubulence up ahead, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Just keep your seat belts fastened and welcome to the Eras Tour.”
Swift is seen in the episode getting some help through the buddy system, as Ed Sheeran lifts her spirits and confidence when he arrives to practice a version of their duet “Everything Has Changed,” performed on the first night in London.
“It’s very cool that he would come and do this,” she says, “because I think it’s just gonna really delight people, in a moment when a lot of the fans need a pick-me-up, because I know I do.”
Swift also gets a pep talk from her mother, Andrea Swift, after admitting that she is “twitchy and fidgety” and her hands are shaky going into the first London gig. After getting through it, she is exultant and, as she puts it, ready to stay back on the horse.
By the end of Episode 1, she is back to being focused on the “euphoria” she sees in her crowds — and the intra-audience visual communication she witnesses from the stage. “There’s so many hundreds of moments of individual eye contact throughout the course of the show. I see the mass quantities of joy that everyone’s feeling. What’s interesting is, there’s some joy in the show, but there’s a lot of emotions in this that aren’t just like ‘Put on your smiley face and come to the Eras Tour.’ It is so much more. You look out in the crowd and these are millions of stories and all these counter-narratives, all colliding in one place where we feel safe to be demonstrative about a whole spectrum of emotion. That stuff is really powerful.
“Life contains multitudes and we are kind of exploring all of the dramatic edges of those things” in the concerts, she believes. “That’s what might be unlocking feelings of joy… feelings of euphoria… and it still gets me. It does.”
The second episode, which is also premiering Friday morning, focuses on more consistently upbeat subject matter, like the creation and execution of the tour’s original choreography and especially a “Tortured Poets Department” segment that was added after that surprise album came out in the spring of 2024.
Episode 2 also spends much more time apart from Swift herself to meet with some of the celebrated members of her Eras Tour team, including choreographer Mandy Moore and fan-beloved dancer Kameron Saunders. (Look for Variety’s coming review of the first two episodes.)
Swift premiered these episodes at a morning screening in New York City Tuesday morning, attended by her family and dancers and a handful of members of the media.
“It was a year ago yesterday that we played the last show of the Eras Tour,” Swift said in briefly introducing Tuesday’s screening. “It feels insane. I know it does for me… It feels like the Eras Tour was a lifetime within my life, so it’s so crazy to square it with it ending a year ago. And with that said, you know, I think since I started performing when I was 14 years old, I have been obsessed with the idea of trying to learn how to entertain people… All the lessons that I learned over 20-plus years are what it ended up being… And I know that’s the case with not just me, but the dancers and the band and the backing vocalists and our lighting and technical departments and our choreography; everything that went into this was all the lessons we’ve learned all of our lives.”
She continued, “And I think one thing that our amazing directors, Don Argott and Sheena Joyce, who are here did was that they told and expanded upon the stories of not just me, but everyone who was a part of this and their stories and what it took to get them to the place where they’ve learned the lessons that it took to get them on that stage to execute this as well as they did.
“But there’s a lot of magic and mystery and destiny and all that stuff,” Swift added. “We can’t explain what happens when something goes as well as this did, but anything that we can explain to you about how we did it, these amazing directors did that. And so I’m so grateful that they put so much time and thought and care into this docuseries.”
After Tuesday’s screening of the two episodes concluded, Swift quickly stepped out in the screening room and began making some closing remarks, before being reminded that she was speaking off-mic and not audible to everyone scattered throughout the large screening room at Disney. “I’ve been off tour for a year and I forgot about what microphones do,” she quipped.
The six episodes of “The End of an Era” are being released two at a time in one-week intervals. Episodes 3 and 4, which have not screened, will come out on Disney+ Dec. 19, and the final two will debut Dec. 26.
