With the frantic holiday season in full swing – not to mention a US presidential impeachment, a countdown to Brexit, and the end of liberal democracy as we know it (or so sayeth Twitter) – the final month of 2019 is shaping up to be more information-overloading than jolly ho-ho. Fortunately, we’re also in the midst of a golden age when it comes to well-crafted, brain-engaging (yet distractingly addictive) docu-series, many of which happen to be in the popular true-crime genre. And a slew of streaming services are competing to snap up these easy-to-market gems.
So whether it’s Netflix or HBO, or even SundanceTV you’re looking to bury your head in, here are five suggestions (most excerpted from reviews I’ve previously written for Global Comment and other outlets) for turn off the news and curl up on the couch viewing.
The Family
Jesse Moss’s docu-series, The Family, was executive produced by Alex Gibney, who likewise produced the Netflix series Dirty Money, which included an episode helmed by Moss (The Overnighters). Watching it is either heaven or hell, which is part of its brilliance. Whether you believe in the religious freedom the Founding Fathers espoused – or in the white Christian supremacy they actually practiced – will determine if the series is a five-part horror film or a much-ado-about-nothing profile (of an organization that, after all, has been “hiding in plain sight” since Eisenhower).
No One Saw a Thing
Avi Belkin, the director and executive producer behind SundanceTV’s (currently streaming) true crime series No One Saw a Thing, has described his six-part look at a nearly four-decade-old cold case as a Rashomon-style inquiry. The Israeli director – whose Mike Wallace Is Here premiered at Sundance back in January and in theaters just this past July – revisits the 1981 murder of “bully” Ken Rex McElroy (and the multiple violent incidents that followed his death) in Skidmore, Missouri by going to the small town and interviewing those who were there at the time. Literally. For though no one was ever charged with shooting McElroy in the head, while his wife sat beside him in his truck, there were by some estimates around 60 witnesses to the killing. And yet, once investigators came calling the entire town closed ranks. No one was convicted back then because “no one saw a thing.”
Behind Closed Doors
One of the most complicated (and epic, as it feels much larger than the sum of its two parts) documentaries I’ve seen in years, P.A. Carter’s Behind Closed Doors was this summer’s not-to-miss film for true-crime devotees. Debuting on HBO July 16th and 17th, Carter’s meticulously crafted picture begins with the double murder of 13-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family’s servant Hemraj Banjade in the Talwars’s upper-middle-class home — a mystery that immediately unleashed a media circus in the staid Indian town of Noida. But it was the whiplash machinations surrounding the subsequent investigations and interrogations, trials and appeals, that kept the public riveted to this decade-plus-long soap opera. One in which class and privilege, and cultural clashes, played a starring role.
The Confession Killer
Robert Kenner and Taki Oldham’s The Confession Killer follows the riveting tale of Henry Lee Lucas, once dubbed America’s most prolific serial killer – and subsequently unmasked as a con man par excellence. In the early 80s, Lucas was the star attraction of a Texas Rangers task force, who admitted to slaughtering scores of folks all across the nation and in a too-wild-to-be-believed variety of ways. In return for his statements he gained worldwide fame and five-star jailhouse treatment – and finally a death sentence. But who was actually manipulating who? By the time DNA testing was finally available to give the lie to Lucas’s incredible confessions, law enforcement from east coast to west had swept hundreds of cases off their books. Kenner and Oldham’s five-part Netflix series does justice to this strange and sad saga by digging deep, and asking us to reconsider the very definition of a “true crime.”
The Devil Next Door
Yossi Block and Daniel Sivan’s The Devil Next Door is another five-part, ripped-from-the-80s-headlines, Netflix series – one in which the lead character may have very well played a role in the killing of not just hundreds, but thousands, of innocent men, women and children. John Demjanjuk was a retired Cleveland autoworker, quietly enjoying life with his wife, kids and grandkids, until Nazi hunters tagged him as being the notorious German death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” Cut to an extradition to Israel, a riveting, roller-coaster trial (complete with a showy defense lawyer who thumbs his nose at his fellow Jews by driving a German car) – and no hard answers. Whether the Demjanjuk case was one of mistaken identity – in which an innocent man was convicted of horrific war crimes – or of a mass murderer able to escape accountability for decades, only one thing is clear: The Devil Next Door proves that human beings are maddeningly complicated, like justice itself – and that absolute “truth” doesn’t always win out in the end.