Coss Marte has one of those biographies documentary filmmakers usually spend an entire feature trying to shape into a clean arc. He ran a multimillion-dollar drug operation in New York while barely out of his teens, went to prison at 23, lost roughly 70 pounds through bodyweight exercises in his cell, started training other inmates, and came home determined to turn that routine into a business. Debra Granik spends five episodes and roughly eight years refusing to make any of this look clean.
That patience gives Conbody vs Everybody its character. Granik begins filming Marte in 2014 as Conbody moves from an idea into a prison-inspired fitness company built around intense workouts and the employment of formerly incarcerated trainers. Marte can sell the concept. He distributes flyers, organizes pop-ups, prepares investor pitches, pursues opportunities like a Saks Fifth Avenue location, and walks into meetings carrying the slightly exhausting confidence of somebody who already knows he will hear “no” quite often.
The trick is that Conbody grows harder to sell once investors understand Marte means the employment mission literally. Admiring his personal redemption is easy. Putting money behind people recently released from prison apparently requires another meeting, three committees, and possibly an eclipse. That gap between applause and action becomes one of the series’ sharpest recurring beats.
The Fine Print of Freedom
Granik rarely lectures about reentry because the bureaucracy does plenty of talking on its own. One of the strongest sequences follows Marte trying to help Shane Ennover secure his release. Phone calls bounce between the parole office and correctional facility as Marte tracks down paperwork that seems capable of trapping a human being through administrative inertia.
The sequence works because Granik lets it unfold at its natural, maddening pace. There is no dramatic score instructing us when to become angry. Marte simply keeps calling. The obvious question becomes increasingly uncomfortable: what happens to somebody who does not have a Coss Marte making those calls?
Conbody itself keeps colliding with similar barriers. Landlords become uncertain. Investors express enthusiasm without commitment. Formerly incarcerated employees deal with financial insecurity, trauma, addiction, gang violence, and a labor market that often treats a completed prison sentence as the beginning of another punishment.
Marte understands that the gym’s prison branding can initially function as spectacle. Customers might enter curious about the novelty of a “prison workout.” Once inside, they encounter trainers whose competence has little relationship to whatever assumptions walked through the door with them. Marte is pragmatic about that exchange. Getting people inside gives his staff the chance to change the conversation. Sometimes social progress apparently begins with burpees. Television has tried stranger things.
People Before Case Studies
The series becomes richer whenever Granik drifts away from business strategy and simply spends time with Conbody’s people. Derek Drescher feeds his cats and talks about his mother’s Jewish background. Syretta Wright falls in love and becomes engaged. Tommy Morris rides the train exhausted while trying to keep his finances together. Marte spends time with his son Cathaniel and supports his brother Chris.
None of these scenes exists to prove a thesis about incarceration. That is precisely why they matter. So much nonfiction about prison fixes subjects permanently inside the event that put them there. Granik keeps finding ordinary details that return scale to their lives.
Her camera extends that attention across trainers including Sultan Malik, Ray Acosia, Jamal Campbell, Gym Star, Shane, Derek, Syretta, and Tommy. The ensemble gives Conbody the texture of a workplace, support network, accidental family, and occasional pressure cooker.
The series does stumble here. Several trainers who receive meaningful screen time simply fade from later episodes. Ray, Sultan, Jamal, Gym Star, and Tommy receive little closure once their stories move outside Granik’s immediate focus. Compressing eight years into five episodes guarantees casualties, yet the omission carries extra weight in a series repeatedly confronting the social invisibility of former prisoners. When your documentary argues that people disappear from public concern, losing track of your own people becomes an awkward edit.
Eight Years Against the System
Granik gradually widens the frame until Conbody begins looking like one stubborn counterexample inside a much larger economy. Investor conferences produce plenty of sympathetic language and precious little financial courage. Elsewhere, a corrections-industry event displays equipment such as tasers and maximum-security doors, quietly placing Marte’s rehabilitation work beside businesses that profit from keeping prisons supplied. The juxtaposition requires almost no commentary.
Then 2020 arrives, and the fifth episode suddenly has enough material for another series. COVID-19 threatens Conbody’s physical business model. Marte and Drescher sew masks for incarcerated people facing shortages. Workouts move outdoors. The protests of that summer add another political current to a story already concerned with policing, incarceration, race, employment, and institutional trust.
This final chapter moves too quickly through material Granik could easily have explored for hours. Yet the acceleration also shows the value of having started filming years earlier. Conbody has already survived investors, landlords, bureaucracy, and the constant instability surrounding reentry before a pandemic arrives to rearrange the rules again. Marte keeps adjusting. The camera keeps watching. Eight years later, that stubborn repetition has become the series’ most persuasive argument.
Conbody vs. Everybody premiered globally on The Criterion Channel on May 1, 2026, following early festival screenings. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Debra Granik, the documentary series follows entrepreneur Coss Marte over eight years as he builds a Lower East Side gym dedicated to employing formerly incarcerated individuals.
Where to Watch Conbody vs. Everybody Online
Full Credits
Title: Conbody vs. Everybody
Distributor: The Criterion Channel
Release date: May 1, 2026
Running time: ~65 minutes per episode (336 minutes total)
Director: Debra Granik
Writers: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini, Victoria Stewart
Producers and Executive Producers: Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini, Victoria Stewart, Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Joslyn Barnes, Jonathan Scheuer
Cast: Coss Marte, Chris Marte, Syretta Wright
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Eric Phillips-Horst, Kefentse Johnson, Sean Hanley
Editors: Victoria Stewart
The Review
Conbody vs. Everybody
Debra Granik spends eight years watching Coss Marte build Conbody, and the patience pays off in details a tighter documentary would probably leave sweating on the cutting-room floor. Investor pitches, parole-office phone calls, outdoor pandemic workouts, and Derek feeding his cats gradually turn a business story into a portrait of reentry in America. The final chapter races through 2020, while several trainers disappear without proper follow-up. Still, Marte gives the series an unusually sturdy spine: every setback reveals another institution happy to praise second chances while remaining suspicious of actually funding one. Funny how that works.
PROS
- Granik’s patient observational direction
- Marte’s magnetic presence
- Rich everyday character details
- Sharp examination of reentry barriers
- Strong eight-year perspective
CONS
- Several trainers vanish from focus
- 2020 material feels compressed
- Some story threads lack closure
