🎬 NETFLIX ANNOUNCES “Till the Song Ends: The Patti LaBelle Story”
A Life in Light and Legacy

On December 1, 2025, Netflix unveiled the crown jewel of its 2026 slate: Till the Song Ends: The Patti LaBelle Story, a six-part, $65 million limited series directed by Joe Berlinger that is already being called “the Aretha doc we never got, but better.”
For the first time in her 61-year reign, Miss Patti LaBelle, 81 and still hitting whistle notes that could shatter crystal, has opened every vault, every diary, every wound, and every kitchen cabinet.

This is not a polite retrospective.
This is church with the doors blown off.

Episode 1 – “Over the Rainbow, Under the Streetlight”
Southwest Philadelphia, 1959. A 15-year-old Patricia Holt stands on a corner with three church girls who call themselves The Blue Belles. Archival footage, never before seen, shows the night their manager is shot dead in front of them after a gig. Patti, covered in blood that isn’t hers, still finishes the set because “the people paid their dollar.” The episode ends with the renaming to Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles and the first time she hears “Lady Marmalade” on a jukebox in 1974 and realizes the world now knows her name.

Episode 2 – “Voulez-vous coucher avec… the Industry?”
1970s excess and exploitation. The male executives who told her “Black girls don’t headline Vegas.” The contracts that paid the white backup singers more than the lead. The night in 1976 when Labelle’s silver spaceship landed on the Metropolitan Opera stage—the first Black vocal group to ever play the Met—and the white promoter who tried to cut their set short because “the donors are leaving.” Patti’s response, delivered live on mic to 3,800 people: “Y’all paid to see space bitches from Philly. Sit your ass down.” The clip has never aired. Until now.

Episode 3 – “If Only You Knew”
The collapse. The death of the group. The solo years where radio wouldn’t play a 40-year-old Black woman. The night in 1982 she opened for Luther Vandross and got booed so badly she cried in the stairwell. Then 1984: “If Only You Knew” and “Love, Need and Want You” go top ten R&B and nobody will give her a crossover pop hit because “she’s too church.” We see the actual rejection letters. Patti reads one aloud and laughs through tears: “They said I was ‘too ethnic.’ Baby, I’m from Philadelphia. Ethnic is my middle name.”

Episode 4 – “Stir It Up”
The comeback nobody saw coming. The 1986 MCA deal. Winner in You. “On My Own” with Michael McDonald—#1 for three weeks, the first time a Black woman and white man topped the Hot 100 together. The sweet-potato-pie empire that started as a joke on Oprah and accidentally made her a billionaire. And the private pain: the deaths of her three sisters to cancer, all before age 45. Home videos of Patti cooking for Jackie, Vivian, and Barbara Jean while they underwent chemo. “I sang them into heaven,” she whispers. “That’s the only time my voice ever failed me.”

Episode 5 – “The Darkest Note”
The 1990s–2000s wilderness. Diabetes diagnosis. Divorce rumors. The night in 1998 when she collapsed onstage in Louisiana and woke up in the hospital thinking her career was over. The comeback with When a Woman Loves (2000) and the gospel album nobody promoted. The moment in 2014 when a viral video of her struggling with the lyrics to “This Christmas” made the world laugh at her—until she turned it into a masterclass on aging gracefully, posting a new version every year better than the last.

Episode 6 – “Still Over the Rainbow”
Present day. The sold-out 80th birthday concert at the Met (again) in 2024. The moment she brings out Fantasia, Jennifer Hudson, and Ledisi to sing “Lady Marmalade” and every Black woman in the audience loses her wig. The quiet scenes at home in Philadelphia where she still cooks Sunday dinner for 40 people every week. And the final 10 minutes: Patti alone in her dressing room after the last show of her 2025 farewell tour, taking off the lashes, wiping away the makeup, and singing “Over the Rainbow” a cappella to an empty mirror. No audience. No microphone. Just Patti and God.