HBO is bringing Burning Man to television with The Man Will Burn, a four-part documentary that premieres Thursday, July 9 and then airs once a week for four consecutive weeks. It is the first Burning Man film backed by HBO, and it arrives as the festival heads into another season in the desert.
The timing matters because this year's Burning Man is set for Aug. 30 to Sept. 7 in the Black Rock Desert near Gerlach, about 100 miles north of Reno, where the temporary city draws more than 70,000 participants. For viewers trying to understand what the documentary is about, the trailer offers a clue in a line from an unidentified Burner: “Live every burn like it’s your last, because it just might be.”
The series, directed by Academy Award-winner Jehane Noujaim and filmmaker Vikram Gandhi, takes in the 40-year run of the festival through recent footage and the roughest moments of the past few years. Marian Goodell, one of the event’s founders and the leader of the Burning Man Project since 2013, says she has had to keep the organization alive through COVID. That history gives the documentary its weight: the event was canceled in 2020 and 2021, even as many people still gathered in the desert, and the 2023 festival was hit by heavy rain that turned roads in and out of Black Rock City into a muddy trap for thousands.
That is the part of Burning Man the series cannot smooth over. The festival still sells itself as release and reinvention, but the footage behind The Man Will Burn points to something harsher, where weather, logistics and survival sit right beside the art and the spectacle. Goodell says, “We’ve been rained out, and we fix one thing and then run into another crisis,” adding that “Things are messy, but everything we are doing is for the survival of Burning Man.”
The four episodes will roll out through early August, and that leaves the central question less about whether the event can survive a bad year than what kind of future its founders think is worth saving. For Burning Man devotees, the answer starts when the first episode lands on July 9.
