I think most of her photos where rubbish if you look at how many were taken and then how many are any good (1%)j.The only reason it gets the airplay is because it's a nice little tale and as I say the best 1% of the photos have been printed by the best possible master printers.
If you say 1% of her pictures were good then you've obviously seen a lot more of her 100,000+ images than I have, so I bow to your superior knowledge.
However, from the selection shown in the documentary, I would say that in photographic terms they are variable, both in technical and artistic quality.
I have seen this done before where black and white prints are printed by an average printer and they look OK. But then they are handed over to a master printer and the same prints look 10x better .Black and white is a lot easier to impress with than colour.That is why most street photography is done in Black and white, otherwise it just looks like a snap.
As pointed out above by redhed 17, the images are B&W because that was the norm for the era, [especially in larger format (rollfim) sizes].
It appears that only a relatively limited number of her images were printed at the time of taking, and many of those were in small sizes.
Given her reclusive nature, it's unlikely that Vivian Maier would have been aware of high quality printing, and remember that in the 60's & 70's there was not the proliferation of photo galleries and exhibitions that there is today, so it's unlikely she would have visited many exhibitions to give her any ideas as to what was possible.
Regarding editing, I think she would have regarded the act of taking a shot enough justification in itself. In other words if it was worth taking it was worth printing & viewing.
If she was as impoverished as has been suggested, she simply couldn't afford to have many of her images printed, but the fact she had
taken the image was sufficient to satisfy her.
There are even reports of rolls of undeveloped film amongst the collection that was auctioned.
It would appear that Vivian's interest was mainly in
taking the photographs, and she seems to be less interested in the results than the act.
The expression "Street Photography" had not been invented when she was taking her photos and I think she was more concerned with documenting everyday life than creating "art."
However, all this is conjecture, and now she has passed no one is ever going to know her true motives, which is what makes her such an interesting enigma.
Plus, I think we all like to see photographs of a bygone era, which is one reason I believe we should keep up the tradition of documentary photography alive, since the commonplace today will be the history of tomorrow, even if it has no artistic merit.
It's just an orchestrated television program that has been produced to make money for it's producers. I don't think she was that much of a good photographer,more a bit of an eccentric which in life carries no weight but in death has some strange allure(Van Gogh). Still it is worth watching just to see how strange see was.
I'm not sure about making money for it's producers.
As a BBC program, it has already been financed by you and I as licence payers.
It may earn the corporation some return if they licence it to another network elsewhere, otherwise there is no financial incentive in making such a documentary.
As to whether she was "strange" then that is down to the interpretation of the individual viewer.
I have always felt self-conscious when pointing a camera at another person, but despite her apparently secretive and reclusive nature, Vivian Maier does not appear to have any embarrassment in doing so.
Which one of us is the more "strange"?
Are yours not? In this case the originator is not the person choosing or editing the images that are shown. The images that are edited and shown are from the perspective of the current owners/curators, and may or may not be a representative of the whole collection, and may not even be what Vivian Maier considered her best. If she even thought of her images in that way. We'll never know. 
