Prime Video’s The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal is the definitive documentary about the Canadian rock band’s rise to fame, relationships and overall impact. It was also the easiest sell of director Mike Downie’s career.

The four-part doc is the latest in a string of successes for Prime Video, winning People’s Choice Documentary Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), following the world premiere on Sept. 5. It dropped globally on Prime Video on Sept. 20, becoming the most-watched non-sports Canadian original docuseries on the streamer to-date within a week of its launch.

Shaun Alperin, head of content for Prime Video in Canada, tells Playback the streamer is “proud of the achievements we’ve had with Canadian documentaries,” including winning people’s choice at TIFF twice in a row, following Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make Believe (marblemedia, Hawkeye Pictures) in 2023, and the global success of I Am: Celine Dion.

Band manager and executive producer Jake Gold helped Downie – a documentarian behind The Hockey Nomad (2003) and brother to late band frontman Gord Downie (pictured right) – secure a meeting with Prime Video in 2020 to pitch the concept.

Downie was adamant the project should be a film “chopped into four pieces” rather than a TV series, with the same editor all the way through. He wanted to cover the band’s meteoric rise, the realities of being in a band for decades, and then the band coming through their difficult years only to grapple with Gord’s untimely death.

Downie brought a treatment, supporting materials and an episode breakdown with him. He wasn’t even halfway through his pitch when Tyler Bern, head of content for Prime Video Australia, New Zealand and Canada, stopped him.

“He said, ‘Sorry to interrupt, Mike, but I just want to tell you, we’re really, really interested in doing this documentary with you guys,'” Downie recalls. “I asked if I should keep going with my pitch and he was like, ‘Well, you don’t have to.’ It was pretty shocking.”

“They loved it and said, ‘Let’s just do it. Go make your film,'” adds Gold. “It was literally that easy.”

Other potential partners were interested in the project, but the duo knew The Hip had a strong streaming presence on Amazon Music. They also felt that Amazon was the most enthusiastic and were the least creatively intrusive. So they struck a deal a few weeks later to produce a four-part documentary under Downie’s Courage Films, with the help of provincial and federal tax credits.

Downie was not able to disclose the budget, but says it’s “larger than I’ve ever had the chance to work with in my experience making Canadian docs.”

Going into production, Downie recalls the team becoming private investigators in order to pull together enough footage. They leaned on fans, people who worked with the band over the years and journalists with old interviews to piece the narrative together. Downie says it felt like a family effort, much in the same way The Hip and its team became a family over the years.

Mark Williams, who directed the music video for “Nautical Disaster,” had a camera backstage at the Maple Leaf Gardens the first time the band played there and was able to share footage from the dressing room. A fan named Andrew Lecesse chased down someone who was at Bishop’s University during a performance in the 1980s and had taped the band backstage.

“We treated every rumour, every piece of information as very sacred and worth our efforts to find it,” says Downie. “We created this huge database. Of course, 99% of it didn’t make the cut, but we have hundreds and hundreds of hours of archive and then hundreds of hours of interviews that we did with the band. I knew a lot of the material was not for the documentary, but it was important to get it all.”

At one point, the documentary reveals how the band fired Gold in 2003 during a particularly hard period. Seventeen years later they hired him back to help preserve the history and find a new path forward without Gord. They knew the legacy wasn’t going to take care of itself.

“We knew we needed to tell the story warts and all and that it had to be authentic,” says Gold of the doc. “If everyone wasn’t in agreement to tell the truth and what really went on – good or bad – it wasn’t going to work.”

Silently, Gold wanted to market the documentary as a 40-year tribute to the band. That’s why the film’s materials contain an “Established in 1984” logo.

“They were always pushing back on the idea of 40,” says Gold. “They don’t really want to count the years per se, so it doesn’t say 40th anniversary. With the logo, the idea is to figure it out for yourself.”

Gold hints this is the beginning of more potential projects for The Tragically Hip. He expects a bump in music consumption from new and nostalgic fans alike. The band sold a commemorative poster on its website in conjunction with the Prime Video release, followed by a coffee table book, titled This Is Our Life, on Oct. 1 with publisher Genesis Publications. They released a vinyl box set of the album Up to Here on Nov. 8 via Universal Music Canada, which reached No. 1 on multiple Canadian music sales charts, according to Gold.

He says they anticipate “north of 20,000” sales in the lead-up to Christmas for the book, which debuted at No. 2 on the Globe and Mail‘s hardcover non-fiction bestseller list for the week of Oct. 12. In addition, Gold says the band has seen “significant increases” in music streams, including a 317% boost for its catalogue in the U.S. “The company line is ‘never say never,’ so there’s no stopping,” he says.

“There is an opportunity to do something else with the band, with some of that footage, so who knows,” adds Downie. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’m certainly not being presumptuous, but there’s more to the story.”

Top photo by Diane Bidermann; middle and bottom photos by Clemens Rikken

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s 2024 Winter issue