Communication design for documentaries is changing with online distribution through global platforms like Netflix. Actuality and entertainment are increasingly often elided in a single program, which confuses the genre categories that tend to underpin the scholarship of documentary as a field of study distinct to that of entertainment. Certain programs are marketed as documentary/docu-series alongside fictional ‘based on real events’ stories and fiction but are constructed as much through significations used in pure entertainment as through those associated with informational and educational media.