Every episode of “Black Bird,” which premiered Friday on Apple TV+, begins with the legend, “The following is inspired by a true story.”
Now, television shows inspired by true stories are a dime a dozen these days; the cachet attached to something that “really happened,” if not exactly as represented by often very famous actors speaking invented dialogue, can be a valuable promotional tool. Audiences respond. Ergo the “true” in “true crime.”
In this case, however, the notice feels almost necessary, given that the story seems a little nutty even once you’ve done enough research to verify the basic facts. — I have not read “In With the Devil,” the book on which the series is based, but I have watched a CNN documentary and a “Dateline” episode on the subject. And while there has evidently been some arrangement of events and sculpting of characters for purposes of dramatic emphasis, the strange basics are true enough: Back in the 1990s, Jimmy Keene (Taron Egerton, musclebound and unrecognizable as the actor who was Elton John in “Rocketman”), serving a sentence for drug dealing, did go undercover in a prison for the criminally insane in an attempt to elicit incriminating information from suspected serial killer and convicted kidnapper Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), with the promise that success would lead to his freedom.
