@glennganges Published March 2, 2026, 7:30 p.m. ET Where to Stream: Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix Powered by Reelgood More On: music documentaries 11 Best New Movies on Netflix: March 2026’s Freshest Films to Watch Stream It or Skip It: ‘Take That’ On Netflix, A Three-Part Docuseries About The Brit Boy Band’s 90s Success – And What Came After Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Man On The Run’ On Prime Video, A Documentary About When Paul McCartney’s Post-Beatles Life Gave Him Wings Paul McCartney Reflects on His 9 Days in Jail After Japan Drug Bust in ‘Man on the Run’ Documentary: “I Was An Idiot” The six-episode Prime Video docuseries Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix follows the former member of the British pop group, originally formed in 2011 on the Simon Cowell-created music competition show X Factor, as she prepares for the birth of her twin daughters. She is excited and hopeful, even as tests reveal potentially very serious complications. But the series also delves into her Little Mix departure, which by all accounts was a nightmare of shouty headlines, static on social media, and enough personal attacks to log a serious hit to Jesy’s mental health. “It feels magical,” she says in Life After Little Mix, of belonging to a world-famous girl group. “And then very quickly it isn’t.”
Opening Shot: “I just remember thinking ‘Jesy, this is a very big audition. You need to nail this.”
The Gist: “It just terrified the shit out of me,” Jesy Nelson says from her home in Brentwood, Essex, where she lives with her mom Jan Nelson, sister Jade, and partner Zion Foster. The X Factor experience did change her life. “Just not in the way I hoped for.” Jesy’s 2011 audition led to her insertion into a group with three other hopefuls, Leigh-Ann Pinnock, Perrie Edwards, and Jade Thirlwall, and newly christened Little Mix, they went on to become one of the UK’s best-selling girl groups of all time, with a thriving international career on the back of singles like “Black Magic” and “Wings.” But by 2020 it was all over for her, having been driven from the group by the pressure in the media, unreasonable expectations, and personal attacks. Five years later, Jesy pats her belly during an at-home photoshoot. She doesn’t care about the outside noise anymore. Life After Little Mix then cuts to a montage of UK celebrity news, which indeed reads as noise.
Cutaway interviews with Jesy, as well as her voiceovers, lead us through her life as it is now. Zion, 25 to her 33, seems like a sweet kid, and in interviews with Jan and Jade, we gain some outside perspective on all the Little Mix fallout. Her mom’s protective nature rises up – it’s clear her daughter’s pop star experience was not all fame and international adulation. “She was a target,” as Jan puts it.
But the docuseries is also about Jesy’s journey, 21 weeks pregnant, as she travels to ultrasound scans, meets with obstetricians, and learns about monochorionic diamniotic twins, a condition where her babies share one placenta. Serious terms like “twin to twin infusion syndrome” spread concern across everyone’s faces, and while Jesy speaks with joy about being pregnant – “This is without a doubt the best thing that ever happened to me” – away from the social media updates she posts with Zion, she often breaks down in tears. Every time she goes to the doctor, the condition of her unborn babies gets progressively worse.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In the 2021 BBC documentary Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out, also streaming on Prime Video, the singer addresses the online bullying she experienced as a member of Little Mix, and her subsequent work on herself. Prime also features Molly Mae: Behind It All, a docuseries about the sometimes controversial influencer and Love Island UK cast member. And Victoria Beckham is a slice of the former Posh Spice’s life with husband David Beckham and their family.
Our Take: Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix begins in 2025, when the singer’s twin babies with partner Zion Foster are yet to be born. Jesy and Zion are so cute together – he loves sipping tea in his particular way; in a photoshoot, they’re lovingly draped across each other’s laps. They can’t help being silly together on social media. So it’s worth noting that since this docuseries was filmed, things between them have changed. But that doesn’t mean you still can’t enjoy the ride as it’s presented here. Life After Little Mix does a nice job of telling its two main stories at once, regularly bouncing back and forth from a younger Jesy’s audition process for X Factor, the forming of the band, and all of the bad stuff that came after – her observations in the series offer a certain unvarnished candor, regarding the entertainment industry and that process – to her life as woman in her second trimester of a twin pregnancy.
Performance Worth Watching: Jesy Nelson’s the star of the show here, and beyond her home life, it’s interesting to hear her first-person recollections of the original audition process for X Factor. Sort of a “how the sausage gets made” situation, with Jesy describing action behind the scenes versus what appeared on the show.
Sex and Skin: None. The docuseries gets a kick out of contrasting Jesy’s sometimes racy outfits from her Little Mix era with the relaxed hoodies at home of her life while pregnant.
Parting Shot: In upcoming scenes from Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix, we catch more shots of the trolling and tabloid headlines that dogged her popstar experience, plus her pregnancy as the weeks advance and concerns continue to creep in.
Sleeper Star: “Look at the size of her knickers that she’s wearing! Look at them bad boys!” Jesy’s mom Jan is laughing as she holds her daughter’s bare essentials while pregnant up to the camera. Producer: “she’s gonna love you for that.”
Most Pilot-y Line: Jesy’s mom also questioned the docuseries at first. So much access, when types clamoring for access was in part what drove her daughter from Little Mix. But Jesy says people only knew her from “horrible pictures, or what they’ve heard.” The show is a way to retake her truth.
Our Call: Stream It. Jesy Nelson: Life After Little Mix presents its combined storylines with skill, of a pop star’s desperate run from the spotlight and her wholehearted embrace of motherhood, with the good and bad of what that entails.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
