Take That

The Ghost in the Machine: Surviving the Pop Phenomenon

Former teen idols always seem a little haunted to me. Maybe they have to be. Being worshipped by millions before your personality has finished forming is not a normal human experience, and David Soutar's 2026 Netflix docuseries *Take That* circles that damage even when it tries not to. Soutar, who previously made the raw and prickly *Bros: After the Screaming Stops*, has 30-plus years of footage to work with here. The difference is that this time the material is arranged with much more caution. The pain is present, but it has been tidied.

The series' real tension comes from what is missing. Only Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, and Howard Donald recorded new interviews. Robbie Williams and Jason Orange exist largely through archival audio, stitched into a history still being narrated by the men who remain under the name. That creates an odd imbalance. You are supposedly watching the story of a five-piece band, but the perspective has already narrowed before the first episode gets moving. *The Irish Times*' Ed Power was not far off calling the result "pleasantly antiseptic, bingeable and forgettable".



When the show relaxes enough to let the absurd early footage breathe, it becomes much more interesting. The sequence on the band's Manchester club years is excellent because it lets you see how naked performance felt for them from the beginning. Nigel Martin-Smith had the group, Gary's songs, and not much else, so the boys ended up in chainmail codpieces and leather gear trying to project a sexual confidence they clearly had not grown into yet. The grainy VHS clips are funny, but they are also exposing. Their faces keep giving them away, darting around for approval while the act tries to sell certainty.

Barlow emerges as the emotional center, whether he wants that role or not. The old caricature of him as the controlling straight man to Robbie's chaos is not exactly disproved here, but it is softened by context. He talks openly about jealousy, ego, and refusing to share songwriting credit, and Soutar keeps returning to the image of him alone with a piano or wandering around a very formal garden, as if middle age has given him too much room to reflect. The series is strongest when it acknowledges how brutally the tabloid culture punished him once his solo career stalled. Watching those old clips of his body folding inward under public ridicule is harsher than the series itself quite knows how to say.



That is why the absence of new Williams and Orange material matters so much. We have already seen, in *Take That: For the Record*, what happens when this band allows genuine unresolved feeling into the frame. Compared with that, this series often feels like scar tissue presented under flattering light. Mark Owen's rehab period and Howard Donald's harder reflections on fame pass by too gently. Maybe that is simply where they are now: older, wealthier, tired of bleeding for public consumption.

And yet the final episode has a warmth the show earns. The surviving trio bicker affectionately, settle into middle age, and seem almost bemused that they made it through the machinery at all. The small backstage argument over whether cauliflower cheese is "too cheesy" tells you as much about their present dynamic as any voiceover could.



In the end, *Take That* is not an excavation. It is a monument with some dents left visible. It does not tear apart the 1990s pop machine or force anyone into public penance. What it offers instead is a gentle record of men who spent years trying to outrun one another and finally learned that the only witnesses who really understand the damage are the ones who were inside it too.