New year, new true-crime documentary from Netflix. Age cannot wither the genre made famous by the streamer all the way back in 2015 with Making a Murderer, which explored the wrongful conviction of Steven Avery for sexual assault and attempted murder who spent 18 years in prison for that and who was later tried and convicted of another murder. That documentary was a decade in the making. Things move more quickly now, and the preferred content is more palatable to a mass audience – tales of victims’ survival and the very rightful conviction of perpetrators meet the voyeuristic appetite and proxy lust for vengeance without requiring too much painful thinking abut the inadequacies of a country’s legal system, say, or the corruption of its law enforcement.
Still, the new approach has brought some astonishing untold stories of forgotten victims into the light and – usefully or not – given us a better measure of the depraved depths to which men can go. (And it is almost always men, who either have an innate problem or need to bring a suit against an incredibly biased set of film-makers and commissioners tout damn suite.)
