Over forty years ago, in the late Seventies, a documentary film team, led by faculty and staff from Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University), documented the life, culture, and society in Shannon County, Missouri, one of the more impoverished areas of the multi-state Ozarks region. The footage gave rise to two separate but related documentary films: “Shannon County: Home” and “Shannon County: The Hearts of the Children.” 

These films always have been available in earlier video formats, and in 2014 the MSU Libraries uploaded the two documentaries to our dedicated YouTube Channel. In recent years, viewing of the documentaries really has taken off. As of early February of 2020, each documentary has been watched hundreds of thousands of times, for a total viewing minutes approaching 9 million for each documentary:

1. Part 1 (Shannon County: Home): 386,785 views, with 8,790,540 total minutes watched, an average of 22.72 minutes per view for this 67-minute documentary.
2. Part 2 (Shannon County: The Hearts of the Children): 463,590 views, with 8,732,400 total minutes watched, an average of 18.84 minutes per view for this 59-minute documentary. 

Although this may be more of a coincidental relationship, rather than a causal one, we did note that online viewing of these two documentaries started to rise about the same time that Ozark, the crime drama web television series, starring Jason Bateman, first became available on Netflix.