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The vast churning machinery of Taylor Swift Inc continues unabated with this six-part docu-series about the record-breaking, moneymaking, 632-day Eras tour. Taylor Swift: The End of an Era goes behind the scenes, joining the tour in earnest at roughly its halfway point, in London. This is a moment of high drama: Swift had just cancelled her scheduled shows in Vienna following a thwarted terrorist plot, and was performing in the aftermath of the fatal attacks on children attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport.

The spectre of violence casts an eerie light over the first episode, which attempts to explore both the cosy appeal of Swift’s devotion to her fans, and the brutality of the real world in which her shows take place. After her first show in London, she hugs her tour manager Robert Allen, and then quietly asks him, “Did anything bad happen that I don’t know about?” The result is unexpectedly haunting, even if this was not the intention.

For the most part, the film is a detailed look at the mechanics of a mega-tour. Fans hoping for the candour or intimacy of the 2020 Netflix doc Miss Americana will find Swift at much more of a remove here. There are brief snippets of her private life, such as a gentle phone call to her fiancé Travis Kelce, in which they jokingly compare being a pop star and being an NFL player, or the sight of her returning to her cats in a hotel room as she buzzes after a show. But overall the series is professional and somewhat distant.

“It is our job to make this look effortless,” Swift says in a lengthy motivational speech to her dancers and band prior to the final show of the tour. The documentary suggests otherwise. It is an enormous endeavour on a massive scale. The band, the choreographers and the dancers all get a moment to shine. The focus on the “how it works” aspect, however, leaves the series without a sentimental core. In its early episodes, it makes up for this by using the dancers as an emotional engine, much like what is arguably the greatest-of-all-time tour documentary, 1991’s In Bed With Madonna (known as Truth or Dare in the US). But the two are incomparable. The End of an Era is not sweaty and rough, but shiny and mannered and polite.

Though it has moments of intrigue, and will no doubt satisfy Swifties, the prospect of six episodes of this feels like a lot for casual observers. It spends a lot of time making the point that Swift is a good employer, for example. “I wanted to over-serve the fans,” she explains, referring to the three-hour-plus length of the live show. It could apply equally to the series.

★★★☆☆

On Disney+ now