After ‘A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,’ Watch the Mr. Rogers Doc on HBO

Have you seen the excellent Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor yet? Have all of your family members seen the excellent Mr. Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor yet? If not, you can easily remedy that offense by watching Won’t You Be My Neighbor this weekend, which is streaming free for HBO subscribers and available for rent or purchase on digital elsewhere. Because not only is Won’t You Be My Neighbor a great documentary—directed by filmmaker Morgan Neville, who won the Academy Award for his 2013 documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom—but it’s the perfect companion piece to A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, another Tom Hanks movie that is now playing in theaters.

On paper, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the perfect family movie this Thanksgiving. This is universally beloved actor Tom Hanks playing universally beloved children’s show host Fred Rogers, after all. The film is directed by Marielle Heller, who recently delivered one of the best films of 2018, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and has gotten rave reviews from critics. (It currently boasts a 96 percent rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.)

But it also might not be quite what families are expecting when they go to the theater this Thanksgiving, in that it’s a little weirder, darker, and a little less about Rogers himself. This is not to say that families won’t enjoy A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood immensely—again, this is Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers, people—but it might leave some wanting to know more about the larger-than-life man behind the sweater.

For that, you should turn to Won’t You Be My Neighbor, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and opened in theaters that summer, where it became one of the most successful documentaries ever—the 12th highest-grossing of all time, behind An Inconvenient Truth. With the right blend heart, nostalgia, and introspection, filmmaker Neville takes you through the history of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which debuted in 1968 and ended in 2001. He also interviews those close to Rogers, who died in 2003 at the age of 74.

Everyone—from his widow Joanne to his two sons to acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma—has a beautiful memory of the host to share. Highlights include Rogers single-handedly saving PBS in his testimony before the Senate committee; Rogers’s heartfelt interview with Koko the gorilla; and a moving story from François Scarborough Clemmons, who played Officer Clemmons. Clemmons, who is gay, was at first told by Rogers he couldn’t come out publicly while on the show, because Rogers feared losing conservative sponsors. But, said Clemmons in a tearful interview, Rogers came around to him embracing his identity in a moment that meant so much to him, Clemmons from then on considered Rogers to be his surrogate father. In other words, even when Mr. Rogers messes up, he does it with more compassion and understanding than most.

While A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood explores Rogers’s impact on our culture, Won’t You Be My Neighbor gets as close as anyone has ever come to unraveling the metaphorical sweater of the figure that raised so many Americans. And as it turns out, the man underneath really is that neighborly.

Where to stream Won't You Be My Neighbor?