Ben Stiller’s Documentary About His Famous Jewish Parents to Premiere on Apple TV+ This Fall

Here at Kveller, we are incredibly excited about Ben Stiller’s documentary about his famous Jewish parents, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, who passed away in 2015 and 2020, respectively.

The actor, comedian and TV-maker who directed the Emmy and Peabody-winning “Severance” and who often collaborated with his famous parents, has been talking about and working on this project for years. He has shared how delving into their lives shed light on his own marriage and his life, and how those discoveries shaped the way he conceived of the film.

So we were thrilled to discover this week that the documentary finally has a release date, and that it is just a few months away! “Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost” will be out in select theaters on Oct. 17 and will be streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 24.

“I feel very fortunate to be partnering once again with the incredible team at Apple TV+, this time on a project that is very personal to me and my family,” Stiller said. “It’s exciting to finally get to share it with audiences, and a great honor to celebrate my parents, both as I knew them growing up, and as I’ve come to know them in new ways through the making of this film.”

The movie will explore not just the illustrious career of the duo, whose act was featured in “The Ed Sullivan Show” more than 30 times, but also their life at home and the way their careers often bled into their personal and domestic lives. As promised, Stiller also turns the camera on himself and his family — his sister, Amy Stiller, is also an entertainer, as is his daughter, Ella, who recently made her off-Broadway debut in the play “Dilaria” — to see how the comedy duo, who later had prolific independent careers on sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “All In the Family,” impacted those closest to them.

The first trailer for the film just came out, and it is so moving, nostalgic,and intimate, with self-effacing conversations between Ben and Amy, who reads her father’s old journal entries in the trailer.

We get tiny excerpts from interviews with Ben Stiller’s wife, Christine Taylor-Stiller, and his son, Quinlin. There’s even a tidbit from an interview with Christopher Walken, who calls Jerry a “kind of a saint.” The trailer is full of a lot of decades-old videos, pictures and recordings that stem from Jerry’s compulsive need to document everything in his life.

We also get to hear where the title of the film came from: “This is all of the truth of our lives, whatever you say, they’ll hear you forever, you’ll never be lost,” Jerry muses in a recording in the trailer, a reflection on how Stiller and Meara’s legacy of entertainment endures to this day, of how they remain forever part of comedy history.

“Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost” will be streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 24.