![]() ![]() In between heartbreaking original interviews and the tense playback of interrogation videos, Ricciardi and Demos often train their camera on the other cameras in the room: the TV reporters and crews they spent months alongside covering the trial and its postcourt news conferences. Making a Murderer indulges in the easiest of true-crime tropes: the news media as exploiters. It grabs people's attention," she says before adding gleefully, "Right now, murder is hot." In the fourth episode of Making a Murderer, the filmmakers show an old interview with a Dateline producer. To Ricciardi and Demos, Dateline even seems to be a punchline. Dateline is watched, but no one is breathlessly dissecting the latest instalment with co-workers come Monday morning. But there was no frenzy then, no White House petitions for Avery's release. An episode in 2006 was even one of the first in-depth looks at the Avery case outside Wisconsin. Yet little gratitude is ever given to the likes of Dateline or other mainstream network news programs, where true crime has been a staple for roughly forever.ĭateline and its murder-mystery format, for instance, has been a weekend tradition on NBC since 1992, drawing millions of viewers every week. "We revisited the Paradise Lost trilogy as inspiration a lot," filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos said in a recent interview with Time magazine, in which they also referenced The Staircase, an eight-parter that aired on Sundance in 2004. Who really did it? Why didn't they question that other guy? It's so obvious – can't the jury see what we see?įor the minds behind these shows, the creative lineage of their work traces back to highly lauded crime documentaries of the past. ![]() They are all, objectively, compelling and compulsive entertainment. Making a Murderer is rightly discussed in the same breath as other recent serializations of true-crime tales: The Jinx, the six-part HBO series about Robert Durst and the mysterious disappearance of his wife and the first season of Serial, the 12-part radio program that follows host Sarah Koenig's quest for the truth in the death of a Maryland teenager. (And I do mean immediate: Many viewers binged all 10-plus hours of the series in days, if not one sleepless night.) It proved to be the most popular holiday release not named Star Wars, immediately spurring a digital cottage industry of amateur sleuths determined to discover if Avery really is a killer. If you don't know what happens next, well, where have you been for the past month? A week before Christmas, Netflix quietly offered up the 10-part Making a Murderer documentary series, an exhaustive examination of what the filmmakers present as a case of police corruption against the accused. In 2005, a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery was charged with murder. True crime – or, at least, a certain kind of hyperstylized vision of it – is having a moment. After all, that Dateline episode aired last spring, months before pop culture's current obsession with a different decade-old killing in Netflix's Making a Murderer. The majority of television viewers can be forgiven for their unfamiliarity with the case against psychic Daniel Perez. Lurid details are exposed! Are you hooked yet? The show is only a few clicks away: Simply go to Dateline's website and look for the recent episode titled Angels and Demons. ![]() Witnesses come forward for the first time. In a new documentary, viewers will be drawn into the world of a decade-long murder investigation. ![]()
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