Read: Hillary Clinton’s memoir, ‘What Happened,’ is cautiously diaristic

Burstein’s docuseries is an answer to that sort of conspiracism. Hillary evinces a notable cheeriness. Each of the show’s four episodes begins with a quick-cut montage of still images from Clinton’s life set to the Interrupters’ frenzied anthem “Take Back the Power.” (“What’s your plan for tomorrow?/ Are you a leader, or will you follow?/ Are you a fighter, or will you cower?/ It’s our time to take back the power.”) What follows are interviews with old friends and colleagues and, often, moments of macabre humor. (Someone once asked what she wanted written on her gravestone, Clinton says at one point. Her reply: “She’s neither as good nor as bad as some people say about her.”)

Early on, though, Hillary makes clear that it will go beyond complicating the caricature of Clinton, and beyond placing Clinton within the history of American feminism. The series does something both more basic and more revealing than any of that: It argues for Clinton’s humanity. It offers a reminder that Clinton is a person—with a human body and a human heart—to the many who are inclined to forget. Decades of life in the public eye have made the film’s subject a very good student of herself. “I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional,” Clinton has said, “but I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself. You need to keep steady. But at the same time you don’t want to seem walled off.”

“Authenticity,” with all its unanswerable demands, hovers over Hillary. The film features several shots of her getting her hair and makeup done, and several other moments of her discussing the shots of her getting her hair and makeup done. (“I calculated it, and I spent 25 days doing hair and makeup,” she says of the 2016 presidential campaign, laughing.) Burstein’s camera is also intimate in its sweep: It is there to catch a scene of Hillary and her husband on a plane, he reading and she sleeping. She’s holding his arm in her hands. It’s there to capture another scene on a plane: one in which Hillary is reading Elizabeth George’s novel A Banquet of Consequences. (Another novel written by George, one can’t help but note, is The Punishment She Deserves.) It’s there to capture the moment on Super Tuesday of 2016, when Hillary and her staffers get word of the states she has swept and call Bill to relay the news: “We just wanted you to share in our hysteria!” she shouts, gleefully.

Read: Sexism is other people

Clinton’s interviews with Burstein (who does not appear on camera) suggest a similar sort of openness. She addresses the conventional wisdom that she is bad at campaigning by explaining that she doesn’t want to promise something she can’t deliver: “I don’t like to say something that I know is not true,” she says, contra decades’ worth of media assessments of her. “I don’t want to say I’ll do something that I know is undoable. That is just anathema to me.”