“The Fourth Estate,” which chronicles 16 months in the life of The New York Times, is reasonably competent, but it’s also superficial and oblivious a little more often than one might like. That said, as is the case with the Gray Lady, it’s a good thing that “The Fourth Estate” exists at all. When both the film and the publication are on their A-game, they’re quite good — and occasionally gripping.

The documentary, which debuts Sunday on Showtime, also has a lot in common with bloated Netflix dramas, padded and too easily distracted, especially in the first two of its four installments. (The premiere runs 87 minutes, and other segments are about an hour.) It has an irritating habit of darting toward an interesting story and then pivoting away again too quickly. Much of the documentary, which opens on the day Donald J. Trump was inaugurated into office, plods along like a dutiful recap of a show we watched not too long ago.

The director Liz Garbus — a veteran documentary filmmaker who received an Oscar nomination for her 2015 film “What Happened, Miss Simone?” — diligently shows what it’s like to work inside a pressure-filled workplace that has no “off” switch. In doing so, she humanizes names like Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt, familiar from Twitter and blockbuster stories. It’s odd, though, that so little conflict is on display; it comes as a jarring shock when a reporter talks about how he and some valued colleagues are “at each other’s throats” now and then.

It’s hard to delve all that deeply into an institution filled with people who appear to be hyperaware of the scrutiny directed at their workplace, wary of the idea of becoming the story themselves. Add in another distancing factor — a defensive mind-set that often frames critiques of the publication as exercises undertaken in bad faith — and “The Fourth Estate” at times comes off as a portrait of different kinds of awkwardness.