Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gary’ On Peaco*ck, A Documentary About Gary Coleman’s Difficult Life And Suspicions Around His Death (2024)

The life of Gary Coleman, who died in 2010 at the age of 42, is mostly well-known, and the public pretty much acknowledges that it wasn’t a happy one. He exploded onto our screens at the age of 10, playing the chubby-cheeked Arnold Jackson in Diff’rent Strokes, and that role haunted him the rest of his days. But the difficulties in his life started a few years before that, and just seemed to never end. A new documentary takes a look at Coleman’s life, the myriad problems he had and the people who influenced him and ultimately betrayed him. It also takes a close look at the circ*mstances around his death and the suspicions that surrounded his ex-wife, Shannon Price, afterwards.

GARY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Gary, directed by Robin Dashwood, examines the difficult life of child star Gary Coleman, and the suspicions around his death in February 2010, when he was 42 years old. The film is chock full of interviews with people intimately involved in Coleman’s life, from his parents Willie and Sue Coleman, to his agent Victor Perillo, to his best friend, Dion Mial, to his Diff’rent Strokes costar Todd Bridges. Also interviewed is Shannon Price, Coleman’s ex-wife, who was in their Utah home when Coleman suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage after falling down the stairs; she made the decision to remove life support two days after the accident.

The documentary covers most of the big moments in Coleman’s life: His emergence as a child star in 1978 when Norman Lear cast him in Strokes as Arnold Jackson; Coleman’s health problems that led him to get a kidney transplant when he was 5 and put him in dialysis for the final 25 years of his life; his arrest on assault charges when he was a security guard; his lawsuit against his parents and his management team in an attempt to regain earnings they took; his move to Utah and explosive marriage to Price.

Dashwood intersperses Coleman’s difficult history with the interview with Price, going back and forth between the ’70s through the ’90s and the relatively brief time period he and Price knew each other. There has always been suspicions that, due to the volatile nature of their relationship, Price had something to do with the accident that led to Coleman’s death. Price’s 911 call is played more than once, and shows her reacting more to the blood gushing from Coleman’s head than actually helping him. Of course, she denies being the cause of his death, and an investigation didn’t reveal foul play.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In many ways, Gary has the same depressing vibe as Quiet On Set: The Dark Side Of Kids TV.

Performance Worth Watching: As calm and collected as Dion Mial is while describing befriending Coleman, becoming his manager and helping him cut his parents and management out of his life, the most compelling interview was with Price, especially when she tries to explain her strange demeanor during her 911 call.

Memorable Dialogue: Diff’rent Strokes hairdresser talks about a time when Coleman got a bit too big for his britches after breaking out as the show’s star — and the presence of Willie Coleman on set increased. Gary asked, for some strange reason, if he could slap her. “Boy, if you slap me, it’ll be the end of Diff’rent Strokes, that’s how [bad] I’m gonna beat your ass.”

Sex and Skin: None. In fact, there’s a scene of a 1999 interview Coleman did with Howard Stern where he says that when he was in relationships, they weren’t sexual because he’s just not wired that way.

Our Take: The overall takeaway we got from Gary was that Gary Coleman had a very difficult life, and a very sad one most of the time. Not that we didn’t know that already, but seeing it presented in documentary form over 90 minutes really points out how even things that should be considered positives in his life, like his preternatural acting ability and comic timing when he was a child, eventually worked against him.

You wonder if he ever had a moment of normalcy in his life after watching this documentary. Remember, this is a person who had a liver transplant when he was 5, and as Mial points out, was doomed to a life of always being diminutive due to the autoimmune suppression drugs he had to take. Even the chubby cheeks he had when he got the Strokes job at 10 were a function of his illness.

He made such an indelible mark on pop culture as Arnold Jackson that he couldn’t get away from Diff’rent Strokes; the stories of people demanding that the grown-up Coleman say Arnold’s signature “What you talkin’ about, Willis?” line just made us shake our heads. And while he’s not the first former child star to be dogged by the role that made them famous, Coleman was the only one who didn’t grow into an adult that looked different from the child that did that role.

There was some discussion about how culturally important Diff’rent Strokes was, and it touches on some of the accusations the show got of promoting the “white savior” narrative, which Bridges refutes. But most of that discussion paled in comparison to the hardships Coleman suffered through moist of his life.

We appreciated the fact that Dashwood tried to get everyone’s viewpoints. Mial and the forensic accountant that he and Coleman hired thought that Coleman’s parents unwittingly ripped their son off, while the Colemans think Mial had an undue Svengali-like influence on their son. Coleman’s former girlfriend Anna Gray was immediately suspicious of Price when they met, but Price can somehow explain away every argument, every physical confrontation, and even the bizarre 911 call she made after Coleman fell down the stairs. Bridges and Strokes crew members felt that Willie Coleman had too much influence on the set, while Willie felt he did nothing wrong.

It’s a depressing story of a person who was surrounded by people who claimed to have his best interests at heart but really didn’t, and to this day none of them have had a “come to Jesus” moment and said, “You know, I really hurt this kid.” And that’s the most disheartening thing we learned during the doc’s 90 minutes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Gary is a heartbreaking but informative look at the life of Gary Coleman, a man who just wanted to live his life but never got a chance to do so.