The chapter discusses aspects of the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of viewers' experience of the real in audiovisual documentaries with a special focus on docudrama. It analyzes the psychological strategies that viewers use to evaluate the veracity of documentaries - eg Tversky and Kahneman's concepts :availability, representativeness and anchoring, and discuss how these mechanisms will make different viewers have different evaluations of the veracity of documentaries. The chapter exemplify the viewer-documentary interaction by an analysis of the docudrama "The Queen".