Taylor Swift’s ‘The End of an Era’: What We Learned From the First Two Episodes

The six-part docuseries premiered on Disney+ on Friday, Dec. 12.

Allie Hayes | 19 Hours Ago

Taylor Swift / Amy Sussman/Getty Images

Welcome, Swifties, one and all!

Today, Dec. 12, is a big day, as Disney+ dropped two major Taylor Swift-related projects: Taylor Swift The Eras Tour: The Final Show and the first two episodes of The End of an Era docuseries. As the title suggests, the former was a pro-shot version of Swift’s final Eras Tour performance. Filmed in Vancouver, B.C., the over three-hour special shows fans the full reworked performance for the first time, featuring the added Tortured Poets Department era.

Meanwhile, the latter was two episodes of a six-part series documenting the ending dates of her record-breaking tour. And while Swifties have only received the beginning of the series so far, they’ve already learned plenty of new things about the incredible feat. With this in mind, here are just a few of the biggest takeaways:

Episode One: “Welcome to the Eras Tour”

The first episode opened with Swift and her dance squad in a huddle. There, the artist became emotional as she expressed gratitude to her team for their hard work to make her wildest dream a reality.

The tour was an emotional undertaking from the beginning

After the opening segment, the episode brought viewers back to the beginning of the journey, as Swift revealed that she’d conceptualized the idea for the tour two years before it hit the road. She credited “two main factors” as her inspiration for the undertaking: the sale of her master recordings—which resulted in her re-recording all of the tracks, forcing her to look back on her career up to that point—and the pandemic, which caused her not to tour for five years.

Swift revealed that she began physical training for the show six months before rehearsals even started. In clips showing the artist on the first day of rehearsals, she held back tears, joking that she was “already weirdly emotional.” Whyley Yoshimura, a member of the dance squad, added that—despite working with multiple artists—he’d “never seen the boss come into rehearsal crying with tears of happiness and passion about their job.”

Swift opened up about the terror threats in Europe

Upon cancelling three dates during the European leg of the tour after authorities uncovered a potential terror threat targeting the stops in Vienna, Austria, Swift opened up about the events, as well as her anxiety around her first performance back.

“It’s just kind of a weird feeling going into these last five shows in Europe because it sort of feels like we’ve done like 128 shows so far, but this is the first one where I feel like, I don’t know, like I’m skating on thin ice or something. We’ve had a series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour. We dodged, like, a massacre situation. And so I’ve just been kind of all over the place,” Swift said. She then went on to talk about the UK knife attack that resulted in the death of three children, emotionally adding, “There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party, and it was little kids that [...] I have a hard time explaining it.”

The episode also showed that Swift met with the survivors of the Liverpool attack before her London concerts.

How Swift pulled off her surprise guest spots

Swift gave fans a peek into how she pre-planned surprise celebrity cameos. Upon meeting backstage, Swift and longtime friend Ed Sheeran chatted about how she was handling the stress of the aforementioned threats, as well as how she planned to spend an upcoming two-month break. Then, the two artists ran through a quick vocal warm-up before deciding how they’d bring Sheeran out to surprise the crowd.

“I’ll do the first verse and the first chorus by myself, just to build tension [...] and then after the first chorus, I’m going the be like, ‘Guys, something’s missing from this,’” Swift told Sheeran. “And that’s when they’re going to start screaming their heads off.”

Travis Kelce made a cameo via a phone call

After a voiceover of Swift declared that she needed “a pick me up,” the artist excitedly answered her phone to reveal her fiancé, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, on the other line. The two happily chatted about their days, and Swift compared the tour to a football game.

“I’m going to the stadium, and we’ll do a little dressing room rehearsal,” Swift told Kelce of her plans for the evening. After Kelce questioned how she was able to practice in a small backstage area before performing in front of thousands of fans, the artist answered, “I love you. I don’t know. How do you remember 36,000 plays that are all tactical missions and then just go do it? It’s the same thing. It’s basically the same job. I’ve got songs to remember, you’ve got plays to remember. You’ve got Coach Reid, I’ve got my mom.”

Episode Two: “Magic in the Eras”

Much of the second episode detailed Swift’s decision to change the tour a little over halfway through to incorporate her latest era, and how she and her team worked to make that happen while she recorded a new album and continued the tour.

Behind the scenes of The Tortured Poet’s Department

“Every single night, no matter what’s going on, we’re going to do everything in our power to blow your mind,” Swift stated at the start of the episode. The show then took viewers through her choice to add in a brand new era to the already stacked show, which involved moving the order of pretty much everything around.

The episode also depicted how Swift surprised the audience at one stop with a guest appearance from Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, who sang a duet with Swift on the song “Florida!!!” from the album. “We’re similar in that the persona is huge, but the person is soft,” Welch said of working with Swift. “So I think that’s why we get along.”

Emma Stone weighed in on the tour’s choreography

While discussing the choreography, Swift revealed that when she was in the initial planning stages, she reached out to longtime friend and actress Emma Stone for her thoughts on the dance portions, saying, “For choreography, I reached out to one of my friends, Emma Stone, who’s done a lot of work with dance in her films. [Asking] like, ‘Who have you worked with that you recommend for this?’ and she’s like, ‘There’s only one person that needs to be on your list: it’s Mandy Moore.’”

From there, Swift connected with Moore, who worked with Stone on La La Land and has an impressive background as a choreographer on several other films and TV shows, including Dancing With the Stars.

The dancers shared their stories

Namely, this episode highlighted Kam Saunders, who opened up about his past struggles in the industry due to comments around body image.

The dancer discussed his upbringing, growing up beside his brother Khalen Saunders—who currently plays for the NFL—and how he had anticipated spending his life teaching dance instead of touring. That is, until he received an email about a “closed audition” for which they “couldn’t disclose the artist.” Saunders attended the audition with the support of his brother, and the rest is history.

“I don’t want my dancers to blend in. I don’t care if they pull focus—I want them to pull focus,” Swift said. “I want you to feel like you saw an entire crew of individual stars on the stage.”

Bonuses for the entire team

It has been reported by multiple outlets that Swift gave out $197 million in bonuses to her team during the tour, but the docuseries also revealed that, alongside their bonuses, Swift wrote each member a handwritten note, which “took her a couple of weeks.”

She also wax-sealed each one and hand-delivered the bonuses to her dancers, having them read the message she wrote for them aloud alongside the dollar amount—which was bleeped out—with several people bursting into happy tears and saying they might “pass out.”

During this segment, it was also revealed that six members of her audio team got matching tattoos to commemorate the experience, reading: “Cruel Summer, 152 Shows.”

When do the next episodes come out?

Episodes three and four of the series will be available to stream on Disney+ beginning next Friday, Dec. 19, with the final two episodes dropping Friday, Dec. 26!

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ALLIE HAYES

Allie Hayes is an experienced pop culture staff writer and editor specializing in movies, TV and celebrity news. Before joining the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit team as a Breaking/Trending News Editor, she worked at several outlets including BuzzFeed, The Daily Dot, and Newsweek. When she’s not writing for work (or writing for fun), you’ll find her curled up on the couch reading yet another romance novel, obsessively watching pro wrestling with her friends, or taking blurry photos of her two adorable cats.