In August of 2018, the Democratic National Committee enacted reforms to make its Presidential-nomination process more inclusive. Perhaps the most drastic of the new rules was a mandate for all states to support some form of electoral participation that wouldn’t require attending a polling station in person. In primary states, absentee ballots have long served this purpose. The target of the D.N.C.’s mandate, it seemed, was caucus states, where, rather than cast private votes, supporters broadcast their choices during jostling, chaotic, party-run affairs that hinge on hours of horse-trading between rival campaigns. In Iowa, whose signature caucuses have for decades occupied the earliest slot in the nation’s nominating process, critics tend to point out that the system effectively disenfranchises those who, for whatever reason, are unable to show up. “You know, there were a lot of people who couldn’t caucus tonight, despite the very large turnout,” Hillary Clinton said, more than a decade ago, on the night she lost the 2008 caucus to Barack Obama. “There are a lot of people who work at night, people who are on their feet, people who are taking care of patients in a hospital, or waiting on a table in a restaurant, or maybe in a patrol car, keeping our streets safe.”

The D.N.C.’s policy was designed to encourage caucus states to accommodate more participants, but the effect has largely been to persuade many of them to adopt primaries instead. Following the announcement, nine states that conducted caucuses in 2016—Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, Utah, and Washington—switched their nominating processes. Among the states planning to stick to a caucus system, Iowa and Nevada have attracted the most attention, largely because their early spots on the nominating calendar make them bellwethers of national success. In February, the Iowa Democratic Party announced plans to début a series of “virtual” caucuses, which would have allowed voters to register their preferences during scheduled phone sessions. The plan had secured conditional approval earlier in the year, and, as of last week, the I.D.P. had been awaiting formal approval by a deadline set for September 13th. Late last week, though, during a closed-door meeting of the D.N.C.’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, in San Francisco, some members raised concerns about the security of the system, citing its vulnerability to hackers. On Friday, the D.N.C. rejected the state’s proposal, concluding that the existing technology posed too large a risk of interference from foreign adversaries.

The decision seemed to jeopardize both the fate of the virtual system and, in theory, Iowa’s claim to the nation’s earliest nominating contest. In New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, a law entitles the secretary of state to change the date of that election so that it precedes any other primary by at least a week. If Iowa’s new plan to accommodate the D.N.C.’s inclusivity mandate causes its nominating contest to deviate too far from the form of a caucus—if, in effect, it becomes a primary to comply with the D.N.C.’s terms—then Iowa’s coveted first-in-the-nation berth might well be at risk. “Iowa would become just another state,” Rachel Paine Caufield, a political scientist at Drake University who studies the caucuses, told me. “It’s hard to envision a world where Iowa wouldn’t go first in 2020, because so many candidates have invested so much here. There’s an expectation that that investment is important and worthwhile. They’re playing by the rules as they have understood them.” (In February, the Des Moines Register predicted that Iowa will have hosted more than two thousand Presidential events before caucus night.)

The Iowa caucuses are as much a political procedure as an intimate neighborhood affair. Attendees bring drinks and cupcakes to precinct locations, where they barter, argue, and shuttle between corners of a room to declare their support for individual candidates. During “realignment periods,” supporters of candidates whose crowds don’t meet so-called viability thresholds are beseeched to join rival camps instead. For many Iowans, this process is a source of pride. Caufield, who moved to the state in 2001, recalled her first caucus as the “most amazing political experience” of her life. “There’s a cultural ethos around the caucuses,” Caufield said. “It’s person to person. It’s open conversation. It’s negotiation and bargaining. There are very few venues in American life anymore where we have these conversations—eager and in good faith. It’s reassuring to me that that still exists.”

For others, the system represents an obstacle to political involvement that even the virtual offering did not promise to amend. Jane Hudson, the executive director of Disability Rights Iowa, told me earlier this week that Democratic Party officials had yet to address accessibility concerns voiced by her organization. For months, she and her colleagues had proposed usability testing, offering their own resources to insure that any virtual system would accommodate Iowans with disabilities. (There are more than three hundred thousand people with disabilities in the state, a figure that exceeds even the record-breaking caucus turnout in 2008, when two hundred and forty thousand Iowans—less than ten per cent of the population—participated.) Though officials from the state party met with representatives from Disability Rights Iowa in June, according to Hudson, they did not follow up afterward or respond to more recent letters sent by her staff. “We’ve tried to work with them for six months,” Hudson told me. “We met with them personally. But they’re still dragging their feet.” (The party did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other aspects of the virtual caucus remained uncertain, too. In Iowa’s physical precincts, the number of delegates allotted to each caucus depends both on population and on prior party support in a given precinct. For the virtual caucus, to which the I.D.P. had assigned ten per cent of the state’s delegates, the population is impossible to predict, in part, because prior participation is nonexistent. (In 2016, ten per cent would have allowed an ample window for Bernie Sanders to surpass Hillary Clinton, who had beaten him by less than three-tenths of a point.) One poll, from February, suggested that the virtual caucus could expand statewide participation by nearly a third. A more recent follow-up, in June, revealed that, whereas two-thirds of those who planned to attend in person indicated that they would definitely attend, only a third of the caucusgoers likely to opt for the virtual system expressed similar enthusiasm. The poll also found that the virtual caucuses would bring in younger, more moderate, and less politically experienced Iowans.

Caufield attributes much of the state party’s difficulty to the logistical nightmare of overhauling the existing system. “Caucuses, by their very nature, are not run by the state,” she said. “They’re run by the party. So all of a sudden the party has to adopt a lot of the logistical roles that the secretary of state’s office plays. They have to figure out who voted early and who didn’t. They have to find some way to validate people’s identity when they’re participating virtually. The party doesn’t have the capacity, necessarily, to do that, because they’ve never had to do it before. The irony of all of this is that the least hackable system on earth is an in-person caucus.”

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the D.N.C. “would recommend exemptions to Iowa and Nevada that would allow them to avoid new guidelines requiring caucus states to allow remote participation without attending a caucus event.” At a press conference earlier in the day, at the organization’s headquarters, Troy Price, the I.D.P.’s chair, acknowledged that a waiver “was a possibility,” but added, “No one has said to me that we have to have a waiver.” Price, who looked flushed, reassured the audience that Iowa would continue to hold a caucus, and that its caucus would be first. (Tom Perez, the chair of the D.N.C., had told him as much on a phone call that morning, Price said.) “We are still committed to making sure that this process is as accessible as possible, to making sure that this process is as transparent as possible, and to making sure that our caucuses are a tremendous success,” Price said. “I know you folks want to have a lot of conversations about what exactly that’s gonna look like. The thing is, we just don’t know yet. We’re taking this news just like everyone else. We are working to see what options are available to us in the time we have left.”

When the playwrights and writer-producers Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch created “GLOW” for Netflix, in 2016, they had rich source material and high-flying narrative challenges to contend with. “GLOW: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,” the late-eighties crazy-bananas show that inspired it, featured, in an era giddy with wet-T-shirt contests and jello wrestling, a leotard-costumed cast of characters with names like Babe the Farmer’s Daughter and Matilda the Hun fighting each other for audiences’ viewing pleasure. Yet for many of those women the “GLOW” experience was surprisingly liberating. The show was run by male eccentrics with money, shot in Vegas, and adored by young boys across the country. For Flahive and Mensch, the challenge was to find the depth in these stories while managing an unwieldy amount of characters and expositional detail, and to do it amid a hurricane of glitter, cultural stereotypes, and body slams.

For the first two seasons and the beginning of the third, the results were mixed—nuanced moments amid a script that added operatic personal drama to an already outrageous, overstuffed scenario. “GLOW” can be exhausting. But it’s packed with great performances from its many characters, including Marc Maron, as Sam Sylvia, the show’s somewhat lovably cranky director, and Betty Gilpin and Alison Brie, as the show’s complicated stars. So I was excited when, a few episodes into Season 3, “GLOW” reached unexpected heights of emotional power and began to shed its flaws. As the season continues, it gathers strength—like a seasoned wrestler who, having been flung out of the ring, crawls back into it, picks her opponent up like a barbell, and hoists her aloft in triumph.

The season begins on the stadium floor, with an oof. My problems with “GLOW,” historically, have fallen into two categories. The first is the handling of the stereotyped characters (Welfare Queen, Fortune Cookie, Beirut the Mad Bomber, and so on), which ranges from smart to tedious to overly pleased with its own satire. The second is the overdetermined drama in the central story arc, in which Debbie (Betty Gilpin) and Ruth (Alison Brie), best friends and struggling actors, fall out after Ruth sleeps with Betty’s husband, are cast on “GLOW” as the American sweetheart Liberty Belle and the Soviet archvillain Zoya the Destroyer, and contend with each other in and out of the ring. Notes of catfighting, Good vs. Evil Empire—it’s all a bit much. In Season 2, their conflict culminates in an act of shocking injury—also too much—but it forces a resolution and, happily, allows us all to move on from that plot line.

The Season 3 opening brings us up to date on both situations. The Soviet-U.S. rivalry rattles along, via Liberty Belle and Zoya, and, with it, Zoya’s wearying mock-Russki accent. The show has moved from L.A. to Las Vegas, into a has-been hotel and casino called the Fan-Tan, and as a publicity stunt Liberty Belle and Zoya go on a live local morning show to taunt each other, Cold War style, during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. (“That puny rocket look like child’s toy. . . . I spit on this Challenger mission!”) After the Challenger explodes, killing its seven crew members, Debbie tells the cameras to cut, and we jauntily segue to the show’s neon-lit, get-pumped intro sequence and theme song, “The Warrior.” Awkwardly half-comedic scenes follow, of Ruth feeling terrible, and of GLOW’s man-child producer, Bash (Chris Lowell), realizing in horror that the opening-night party he’s throwing is space-themed. (Oh no!) I found myself feeling nostalgic for the way “Mad Men” handled the J.F.K. assassination, with Roger sitting glumly at his daughter’s underpopulated wedding reception. The Challenger plot feels tonally off and too on the nose—not worth the use of the tragedy as material.

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Season 3 improves as the writers move the characters beyond the roles that they’re stuck in, as wrestlers and as people. The Vegas plot line gives the show a stable setting and an intriguing milieu—a comfortably absurd place to spend time in, allowing our friends a bit more freedom and happiness—and the new setup lets the show within the show, having established a routine, to be less of a focus. Debbie became a producer in Season 2, and we watch with satisfaction as she thrives in the role, finds a way to incorporate her toddler into her working life, and begins dating a tycoon with a warm sense of humor, wonderfully played by Toby Huss (who was also wonderfully terrifying in Lynn Shelton’s “Sword of Trust,” starring Maron, this summer). Ruth navigates a stable but long-distance relationship with a kindhearted cameraman while figuring out her more stimulating relationship with Sam; Sam continues to mature as he helps his daughter navigate her fledgling film career. Many wrestlers get rewarding new arcs, among them Jenny (Ellen Wong), who plays Fortune Cookie; Arthie (Sunita Mani), who plays Beirut; and the spooky Sheila the She-Wolf (Gayle Rankin), who undergoes a freeing de-gothification process. Some of their transformations are set in motion by an episode in which the wrestlers switch characters, which is as fun (and occasionally upsetting) for us as it is for them. But to me, the most exciting arc this season focussed on Bash—catalyzed by a stellar addition to the cast, Kevin Cahoon, who plays Bobby Barnes, a beloved and emotionally astute drag performer at the Fan-Tan.

“GLOW” has long implied that Bash—a cute, wrestling-obsessed naïf with family money to burn—is gay, closeted not only to the world but to himself. He’s now married, for green-card reasons and beard reasons, to Britannica (Kate Nash), one of the wrestlers. In Season 3 they manage to eke out an intriguing, semi-articulated kind of love, and even, at first, a happy sex life. Conventional wisdom led me to expect that Bash—a handsome, closeted innocent on a progressive show about an unenlightened era—would somehow manage to come out and find love with a man, giving such a character, for our emotional satisfaction, happiness that reality might not have fostered. But what “GLOW” does is riskier and more interesting—it explores a likelier trajectory, in which Bash goes further into the closet. (Spoilers follow.) In Episode 4, Bobby performs for Bash, in the hope that Bash will sponsor his playing a bigger room at the casino. (As Liza Minnelli, he sings “Yes,” from “Liza with a Z.”) But he’s also made the mistake of implying that he knows Bash is gay—and that, combined with his self-actualized camp persona, is more than Bash can handle. “Say yes—yes! ” Bobby sings, ending with a flourish. “Well?”

“No,” Bash says. He rejects him pointedly, cruelly—and for a few episodes he becomes a bit of a monster, showing us how a self-loathing gay man from a conservative world, at the height of the AIDS crisis, might spiral into fearful, destructive behavior, wielding his power in reckless ways. The season finale is a tour de force, for most of the characters and especially for Bash; in a scene in which Bash drunkenly confides in Debbie about his attraction to men, Lowell’s heartbreaking performance makes our emotions ratchet, in an instant, from contempt to tenderness. It’s as moving as anything I’ve seen on TV this year. Just as deftly, Gilpin evokes how Debbie’s empathy melds with her shrewd opportunism. Meanwhile, in the ring, the wrestlers are doing “A Christmas Carol,” complete with Ruth as Zoya as Scrooge (“Today, I defect from Communist Russia, and join in glorious American celebration!”) and Jenny as Tiny Tim. Netflix hasn’t yet announced the fate of “GLOW” and its lady wrestlers—but may it bless them, every one.

Does a movie about a boldly original artist have to be a work of aesthetic audacity in itself? And what’s the difference if it isn’t? Stanley Nelson’s documentary “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool,” made for the PBS series “American Masters,” isn’t such a film. It’s made with deference to the encyclopedia-like conventions of popular nonfiction filmmaking, a conventionality that works to the disadvantage of the presentation of Davis’s music, its historical context, and the evocation of the artist’s personality and experiences. Davis’s music provides pleasure, excitement, surprise, shock, and energy; the movie has a rote and dutiful air. There’s some significant information in the movie, which emerges from interviews that Nelson has done with a variety of people who knew Davis personally, even intimately, and also with scholars, who bring knowledge and insight. Yet it’s hard to imagine those who love Davis’s music finding much to love in the treatment of the music in the film—or those who don’t love it yet being inspired by it, either. And the movie’s formulaic approach serves its journalistic aims just as poorly.

Throughout, the movie doesn’t so much coördinate voice and music as it plasters voice onto music, as if in fear that too much musical performance heard (and even seen) without interruption for more than ten or a dozen seconds would bore or frustrate viewers who lack a preëxisting ardor for jazz. An opening title card states that the music heard is Davis’s, except where noted, and that the text of the voice-over narration (performed by Carl Lumbly) is entirely by Davis—and, from the start, the text overwhelms both the music and the images, as narration and music play on the soundtrack at the same time as still photos and film clips crowd the screen in a merely illustrative montage of visual wallpaper. Davis was born in 1926; that number appears onscreen, introducing a rapid-fire montage of familiar nineteen-twenties iconography of flappers and Prohibition, streetcars and propeller planes. Much of the narration comes from Davis’s autobiography (which he wrote with Quincy Troupe), and this text, too, is cut and pasted, joining disparate passages to deliver the desired information in brief, contrived packets. The indiscriminate slew of still photos that accompany the spoken text is, for the most part, adorned with nervous panning and zooming. (The condition could be called Ken-Burnsitis.)

There are movies that bring aesthetic imagination to portraits of artistic subjects. Some notable ones, such as Shirley Clarke’s “Ornette: Made in America,” about Ornette Coleman, or Michelle Memran’s “The Rest I Make Up,” about María Irene Fornés, treat subjects who were alive at the time of the filming, and whom the filmmakers filmed in person, with reference to their personal connections, relationships, shared experiences. These films don’t just provide information; they provide a sense of connection, of contact. Nelson didn’t film his subject: Davis died in 1991, at the age of sixty-five. What he does have, though, as a point of potential personal connection to Davis, is a vast archive of Davis’s work—a trove of performances, interviews, writings, even art work by Davis. It’s a familiar archive, one that any of us can access, and that ubiquity is something for a filmmaker to overcome, in restoring the wonder that any of it exists at all. “Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” treats it instead as nearly disposable, fungible, ordinary. The quantity of archival material becomes an impediment to a sense of passion for any bit of it; not once does the movie offer a sense of stopping still with awestruck admiration, of developing a trope of form or style that fosters a moment of discovery.

Where Nelson’s firsthand, immediate engagement is implicit throughout, and where the movie provides its greatest thrill, is in his interviews with a wide range of people with a long-standing connection to Davis—musicians with whom Davis performed, including the saxophonist Jimmy Heath (with whom he recorded in 1953), the drummer Jimmy Cobb (who worked with Davis from 1958 to 1962), and the three surviving members of Davis’s great mid-sixties quintet (the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, and the bassist Ron Carter), and Davis’s longtime collaborator the arranger and composer Gil Evans. We also hear the reflections of such scholars as Farah Jasmine Griffin, Tammy L. Kernodle, Stanley Crouch, and Jack Chambers; the recollections of longtime friends of Davis, such as Cortez McCoy and Sandra McCoy, Davis’s childhood friend Lee Ann Bonner; and the reminiscences of the concert organizer George Wein, among those of many other participants.

Yet there’s no distinction to the filming of these interviews, which are done in bright yet manicured light in the form of talking heads, neither close enough for intimacy nor distant enough for a sense of physicality. Their remarks are cut down to the briefest of sound bites, delivering specific bits of information that drive the movie ahead. There’s no sense of dialogue between them and Nelson, no sense of a question posed or another aroused, no sense of continuity of ideas, of curiosity, of the free play of memory, of anything resembling a conversation, let alone a relationship.

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Nelson allows—or, rather, compels—his interview subjects to shoulder the brunt of the work. His voice isn’t heard on the soundtrack; he isn’t seen. Because the narration is entirely in Davis’s literary voice (and Lumbly’s spoken one), the filmmaker is present only in his shaping of the material, in his choices of what to include and to what end. This faux objectivity makes “Birth of the Cool” reminiscent of another contemporary strain of documentary filmmaking, the immersive or observational documentary. Like those films (a pair of current examples are “Honeyland” and “Jawline”), “Birth of the Cool” creates a sealed-off, one-way sense of observation; it limits, in advance, by fiat, the kinds of information that the movie can include.

Some of the film’s most noteworthy sequences involve the racism that Davis endured, and the racial implications of Davis’s public image and rise to fame. The movie highlight Davis’s role, as an elegant, stylish, wealthy, and uncompromising black American, in fostering a sense of racial pride, for which, Heath says, Davis was “Exhibit A.” The drummer Lenny White says, “Miles Davis wore slick clothes, drove fast cars, all the women, and everything. We didn’t just want to play with Miles Davis, we wanted to be Miles Davis.” The role was distinctly gendered, Griffin says: Davis presented an ideal of “a kind of masculinity, a kind of black man who takes no shit.” One example of his exacting sense of principle was his insistence that the cover of his 1961 album “Someday My Prince Will Come” feature a photograph of a black woman—Davis’s wife at the time, Frances Taylor.

The most extraordinary presence in the film is that of Taylor, a dancer, who was Davis’s first wife. She and Davis met in 1958 and married in 1960; she left him in 1965 (and died last November, at the age of eighty-nine). In her interview with Nelson, she speaks of the romantic excitement of their life together, of her involvement in his art; among other things, she introduced him to flamenco, resulting in his album “Sketches of Spain.” (Later in the film, Nelson also cites the influence of Davis’s second wife, the singer Betty Mabry, who played a significant role in Davis’s turn, in the late sixties, to electric instruments and rock-funk rhythms—and who is also on the cover of one of Davis’s albums.) Taylor discusses Davis’s jealousy of her personal and artistic independence—she was cast as a dancer in the original production of “West Side Story,” and he insisted that she quit the show and devote herself to their life together. As she tells Nelson, “What I ended up doing was performing in the kitchen.” She also speaks of Davis’s romantic jealousy and the violence to which it gave rise—she once told Davis that she found the composer and arranger Quincy Jones handsome, and Davis hit her. “That was the first, and it wasn’t going to be the last, unfortunately,” she says. (With astounding tastelessness, her account of Davis’s violence is accompanied, on the film’s soundtrack, with an overlaid drum solo.)

Taylor connects Davis’s violence to the cocktail of drugs—prescription and recreational—and alcohol that he was using and abusing. Davis describes the aftermath of his Paris tour in 1949 and 1950—the anguish of his return to the relentless racism of the United States—as precipitating his heroin addiction. He kicked the habit a few years later (owing to the intervention of his father, a prosperous dentist). Then, in 1959, Davis—taking a cigarette break in the street between sets that his band was playing at a Manhattan jazz club—was beaten by a police officer and arrested, an incident that left him shaken and bitter. (The horrific attack proved to be a major public event, nearly sparking a riot, but the movie offers little context.) It precipitated his use of drugs. So did his chronic pain from a degenerative hip condition (resulting in major surgery in the mid-sixties), and so did pain from an injury from a car accident, in 1972.

The film includes an interview with Marguerite Cantú, with whom Davis had a relationship; she says that, at first, he was “clean” and “healthy,” adding, “I knew that Miles was getting back into drugs, even though he hadn’t been doing them around me, because he was getting paranoid a lot. He was violent; he was abusive. I said, ‘You know, I’m not gonna live like this.’ ” The movie details Davis’s heavy cocaine use in the late nineteen-seventies, a time when he wasn’t performing; it credits his third wife, the actress Cicely Tyson (she and Davis were married from 1981 to 1988; she’s not interviewed in the film), with helping Davis to kick drugs. In an interview in the film, the artist Jo Gelbard, a woman who was in a relationship with Davis in his later years, speaks tenderly of his temperament in those times.

In a trio of clips that end the film, Cantú and Taylor speak admiringly of Davis—“I don’t regret, I don’t forget, but I still love,” Taylor says—and Davis’s friend, the artist Cortez McCoy, remembers him tearfully, saying, “Of course I loved him. He was like a brother who did dumb things, and you accepted it.” While facing up to Davis’s violence toward women, Nelson relies on these comments as a sort of benediction, if not a kind of absolution, as if suggesting that, if the women who were among his victims still speak of Davis with love, so may we all.

Yet there’s more to be said on the subject. The writer Eric Nisenson was a friend of Davis’s from 1978 to 1981 and interviewed him frequently; in 1982, he published the Davis biography “ ’Round About Midnight.” When it was reissued, in 1996, Nisenson added a new preface, in which he expressed regret about not having written more fully about Davis’s violence toward women, which Davis himself revealed to him and which he called “well known throughout the jazz community.” Nisenson writes there of Davis’s relationship with a woman called, pseudonymously, Daisy, who was living with him. One night, Davis summoned Nisenson to his home, on West Seventy-seventh Street, and told him that he had broken Daisy’s jaw, leaving her hospitalized. “ ‘So, what do you think, Eric. Am I an asshole?’ ” Davis asked him. Nisenson expressed his anger to Davis and asked, “How could you do such a thing?” Davis’s response was, “I meant to pull my punch. I know how to pull my punch.” Nisenson died in 2003; the film includes no interview with anyone who’s identified as Daisy, and nobody who’s interviewed in the film mentions the assault. No one refers to or quotes from Nisenson’s book. It’s only one example, albeit a major one, of the results of Nelson’s narrow artistic approach. Were such discussions included in the film, had Nelson expanded its purview to include the full spectrum of the archive, had he pursued a freer form and a wider scope of discussion with its participants, the concluding grace note might ring somewhat differently.