Bobby Deen, son of disgraced TV chef Paula Deen, has reservations as he sits down with Billy Corben, director of the new documentary, Canceled: The Paula Deen Story.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea. Honestly. Why do you need a documentary?” Bobby asks with a pre-rueful chuckle, admitting that the only reason he’s there is because his mother and brother Jamie were doing interviews.

Having seen the 103-minute final film, I can say that Bobby needn’t have worried. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a more sympathetic film about Paula Deen, or at least a film more sympathetic to her myriad excuses in the face of the scandals that got her, as the film’s title indicates, “canceled.”

My own reaction going into Canceled: The Paula Deen Story was more in line with the second part of Bobby’s quote: Why do you need a documentary? But I was prepared to approach it with an open mind because Corben has done good work — Cocaine Cowboys, The U, God Forbid — on the occasionally complementary intersection of lawlessness and capitalism.

Unfortunately, the documentary falls short of a thoughtful critique of cancelation. I think that Canceled: The Paula Deen Story introduces enough elements to launch its desired conversation, but fails to do the heavy-lifting itself.

If you only think of Paula Deen as a butter-loving Southern chef who erupted out of nowhere to become a Food Network and cookbook staple in the ’00s, only to come crashing down in an N-word-related debacle, never to fully return … well, that’s pretty much the story here. 

Deen, her sons and mentor Gordon Elliott fill in some biographical basics: namely, the early death of her parents and the marriage at 18 to a man prone to negligence and a dismissive attitude, which kept Paula from pursuing a career and presumably contributed to the depression and agoraphobia that she beat when she launched a catering business, and then a restaurant, and then a TV empire. As rags-to-riches stories go, it isn’t bad, nor is it told with any notable flair. Were it not for the end of the story, you probably wouldn’t care about the beginning.

Chances are good that, 12 years after the beginning of the end, you probably don’t remember the specifics of Deen’s downfall — other than that it involved the N-word, and that it must’ve been bad.

The truth is trickier than that. Deen was part of a discrimination lawsuit brought by a former employee and mostly directed at Deen’s brother, who had been set up with a successful restaurant of his own. In a deposition for that case, Deen was asked if she had used the N-word before and she said, “Yes, of course.” She gave some evasive context, but it wasn’t like she used the N-word in the deposition or was caught using it. 

Reading the deposition now, Deen comes across as naïve, ignorant and a part of a certain generation of Southern upbringing — but her scandal was adjacent to far more graphic scandals involving Duane “Dog” Chapman and Mel Gibson, who were actually recorded using the N-word in grotesque situations, with neither facing an exile that was comparable in any way to what Deen received.

If Corben had dedicated the rest of the documentary to exploring what happened with Deen, why her multiple tear-filled apologies didn’t accomplish anything, and why being “canceled” means different things for different people, there’s a good documentary in that. 

That documentary could still feature food historian Michael Twitty, who is responsible for 100 percent of the clever analysis in this film — including the observation that it was white people who truly canceled Paula Deen, mostly because Black people weren’t surprised. 

“I think it’s less about cancelation and more about accountability,” Twitty says.

At that point, it’s hard for me to tell if Corben fails or Deen fails, because Canceled: The Paula Deen Story isn’t about accountability at all. It’s about excuses. She didn’t say the N-word; she said she had said the N-word, in the context of a situation in which she’d been held at gunpoint by a Black bank robber. Every time the documentary suggests she did anything wrong, it moves the goalposts — as if there’s a codified rule that honesty under oath absolves people of one traumatic N-word usage, but only Southern women of a certain age and era.

The pushing of the goalposts includes unappealing and snide assaults on basically anybody who ever said a negative word about Deen. Anthony Bourdain is presented as a self-hating bully. The woman who brought the discrimination suit is undermined for being white and a second woman, who is Black and who accused Deen of being racist, is undermined for an alleged financial motivation.

Perhaps figuring that nobody bought her previous public apologies, Deen keeps her ratio of excuses-to-regrets at around 10-to-1 and Corben rarely pushes back (which is odd since he corrects her for a malapropism on “deposition”). He just lets Deen and the brothers steer the argument. 

Corben doesn’t even get into the nature of Deen’s “cancelation.” Yes, she’s been largely absent from television, but not entirely. She was on Dancing With the Stars. She guested on MasterChef. More than that, it’s only briefly admitted that while her television career fizzled, she had at least a half-dozen restaurants that survived her scandal and then the pandemic. It’s one thing to strongly imply that her cancelation was disproportionate, but not if you don’t engage with the ways that Paula Deen’s past 12 years have been, on their own terms, not unsuccessful. What punishment should she have faced?

Canceled: The Paula Deen Story exists to complicate, if not redeem, a soiled legacy and it does that. It’s just that nobody here other than Twitty knows how to do anything meaningful with that complication.