I think the over-the-top style and "dumbing down" is an American influence. Many European countries have or used to have many tax paid productions on public channels, where they didn't have a business mindset at all. Especially before ~2000 in my post-communist country, documentaries were not optimized for engagement, partially because the people making it were not skilled in marketing and just didn't think that way.
Those productions are often actually really boring though. For all the bad stuff we say about History Channel and alien documentaries, it was torture to watch some boring history docus in school history class about some medieval battles with a dry voice detailing the dates and the names etc.
Sure there's a space in between, I just mean that the very commercial-focused documentaries are more an American thing and arrived along with American style cable TV to Europe.
Those productions are often actually really boring though. For all the bad stuff we say about History Channel and alien documentaries, it was torture to watch some boring history docus in school history class about some medieval battles with a dry voice detailing the dates and the names etc.
Sure there's a space in between, I just mean that the very commercial-focused documentaries are more an American thing and arrived along with American style cable TV to Europe.