Streaming services are teeming with celebrity documentaries, but few of those movies have inspired responses more sentimental than Pee-wee as Himself . “It’s overwhelming to take that in,” director Matt Wolf tells The Hollywood Reporter . “The scope and depth of people’s emotional reaction to the film has been surprising.”

The HBO two-parter, now nominated for five Emmys (including outstanding documentary or nonfiction special), has united the many TV viewers who grew up with Paul Reubens, the Groundlings alum who subsumed his own identity through the childlike character he popularized in the 1980s. Pee-wee Herman ‘s distinct brand of buffoonery — his honking laugh, his brattiness, his oddball aesthetics — felt like outsider art that somehow made its way into the Saturday morning

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