(part 1)
Unsolved Mysteries Season 1 - Netflix
I'll Be Gone In The Dark (2020), d. Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff, Myles Kane and Josh Koury - HBO
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Tru Crime is omnipresent, a never-ending parade of documentary films, tv series, books and podcasts. The reality of true crime is that it's cheap to produce, and there's never any shortage of material, these horrendous and fascinating and horrendously fascinating things just keep on happening.
While Tru Crime was a genre before the emergence of Unsolved Mysteries in the 1980's, this was for an entire generation, our first exposure to it, and the mother of all true crime reality TV. What made the original show so compelling was its mix of crimes and the unknown. One segment about a sleepwalking murderer would lead into a tale about a UFO sighting, followed by an arson story and then, I dunno, bigfoot. This blend of the real and the surreal was just the right mix to tell its audience to relax a little bit. It's not that the cheesier mythic creatures segments diluted the potency of the crime segments, but they helped an audience deal with their anxiety by providing some content they could be skeptical about.
Robert Stack as host provided an air of gravitas to the proceedings, his craggy, stern face and from-deep-in-the-chest delivery meant no nonsense, even for the more nonsensical segments of the show. The original series had a tip line, and kept you coming back even during summer repeats hoping that the intense "Update" music would startle the shit out of you and Stack's voiceover breathlessly raced through the current details of the case. Oh and that music, the end credits music, was certain to haunt my dreams every night after watching an episode.
The show lived beyond Stack's hosting to include stints by Virginia Madsen and Dennis Farina in a resurrected series in the late Aughts basically operating in the same formula. Off the air for a decade, Unsolved Mysteries returned this spring on Netflix, guided by Stranger Things' Shawn Levy as EP.
It's a bit of a shock to the system going into the Netflix show if you were an avid viewer of the previous incarnation, for it is nothing at all like the previous show. To start, it's a single subject per episode, features no narration or host, and its reenactments are delicately handled as opposed to the gauzy, melodramatic reenactments of the original. The format is less pulp noir, and more modern documentary. If it weren't so compellingly effective, often upsettingly so, I would be appalled that they would even have the gumption to take on the Unsolved Mysteries moniker.
But the inaugural six episodes are a wild mix bag in subject matter but each one fascinating in its own way. It's hard to cite "production values" in a documentary but there's obvious experience behind the scenes here... the editing, the pacing, how the interviewees are captured, and information doled out...it's all very crisp, very methodical.
Each story has its disturbing facets, whether it be the strangeness surrounding Rey Rivera's unusual death in "The Mystery on the Rooftop", Patrice Endres' vanishing in a 13 minute window between last sighting and a recorded phone call, the whereabouts of a patriarch who murdered his family and disappeared, the likely racially motivated murder of Alonzo Brooks, the seemingly verifiable alien encounters in Berkshire county, and a missing woman, likely murdered by her mother after threatening to go public with her involvement in her father's murder. That these stories exist at all is a little harrowing, and just spending an hour understanding some of the details of the cases at play is like having the breath sucked out of you. It's unpleasant.
But then we live in unpleasant times, and sometimes confronting that unpleasantness is necessary in order to deal with it. As with Unsolved Mysteries past, there is a public plea for information. Unlike UM past, the modern day has Reddit groups and other forums where armchair detectives actively pursue investigating these types of things, and the global exposure of Netflix allows for a story like "House of Terror" (a mystery from France) to have a reach that may actually wind up locating the murderer. Updates these days will not be in-show, but online, and if you do one search on your phone of status updates from the show, you'll likely see news in your feeds for months to come.
A second half to season 1 is due in October.
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I'll Be Gone In The Dark sets a new bar for Tru Crime documentary. This six part series doubles as an examination of the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer and crime writer Michelle McNamara's crucial examination into the case that ultimately led to the decades-old rape and murder spree being solved.
The first episode almost falls into the trap of many documentaries about serial offenders, looking at true crime from a standpoint of fascination, a source of entertainment that glorifies the criminal and/or obsesses curiously over their actions, rather than clinically examining or even hitting home the repulsive nature of the crimes. Too often true crime filmmakers want you to share in their fascination, to communally absolve them of their morbid curiosities by partaking in them. By the end of the first episode, we know this one is different.
People were affected by these crimes, traumatically so, and this series, as much as it sits with the mystery of "who" and "why" also makes incredible strides in highlighting what the victims and survivors of the brutal crimes EAR/ONS perpetrated.
McNamara is famous in true crime circles for her honest examinations of murders and murderers and her ability to remember the impact they had on the victims and the populations exposed to their crimes. That human angle, the documentary postulates, is what elevated her as a true crime writer, her ability to empathize with the victims, to downplay the sensationalism and remind us the true fallout of the most savage actions of man.
We get deep into McNamara's life, her difficulty with her mother, a traumatic grooming incident with a boss, marrying comedian-actor Patton Oswalt, becoming a mother, but also descending into obsession over the EAR/ONS case, and her accidental death. After a resoundingly popular piece in an LA magazine she's contracted for a book which becomes both fixation and burden, as her level of meticulousness and empathy start to have an impact on her mental health. Oswalt's fame enters into play for mere seconds of the 6-hour docuseries, and he makes pains to ensure his wife is portrayed as her own magnificent, intelligent being and not just an attache to his personality. Her story in itself is heartbreaking, the production regularly reaffirming her conflict between author, detective and mother.
I found insight into their marriage, and particularly the text message captures of Oswalts resolute support for her endeavor to be both beautiful and gut wrenching. Though they don't focus on Oswalt's battles with depression, McNamara's come to the fore at times, and it's clear that Oswalt understands. At the same time, he understands the creative process, and his emphatic championing of her writing, supporting her with encouragement and time and space, is a testament to what marriage truly means: holding the other up while they struggle. Oswalt being an executive producer could mean that any conflicts in their relationship didn't make it to final edit (there's a particular point where McNamara brings up having another child to which Oswalt firmly shuts it down, never to be brought up again), but for the most part it's two independent thinkers who found each other and seemed to be on the same tract as parents.
The split time between McNamara's struggles with the case, and the actual investigation of the case take a bit of getting used to, narratively, but it ultimately works. One thing the series points out is her gift of being able to empathize with the EAR/ONS victims. She had a gift in being able to approach them about the worst time in their lives and not just poke around for clues, but understand what they had to go through. So often all we see in media as a result of a crime is the scene or evidence or analysis of the perpetrator... we so rarely get the victim's experience. This documentary ensures the survivors and the victims are not forgotten.
It's painful, absolutely painful, to hear first hand some of these women (and one man) relate their experiences. It's upsetting, but important that they are given the platform to do so, and I think in doing so this documentary honors McNamara's approach to true crime, and celebrates their bravery. It's uncomfortable when these women will sometimes introduce themselves by number, but they're taking ownership of it. The more they talk, the more they tell their story, their trauma, their pain, the more they can embolden others to do the same. There's bravery face-front in this docuseries, just giving these people a high profile forum to tell their truth, and that's a rare thing. To note that victims of crimes were (and likely still are in many cases) just treated as another piece of evidence, and not actually cared for in any human way, it's ghastly.
Through McNamara's diligence, her investigative tenacity, she started to bring people together behind the scenes. It was after her passing that ideas about using DNA ancestry sites to try and track down the present-day whereabouts of the redubbed Golden State Killer finally led to finding him and a conviction. Even with the unveiling of this horrible man, in the final episode, it doesn't completely descend into biography of the man, it still takes its time to see the effect it has on McNamara's friends, family, colleagues, and the victims and survivors. It's never about glorifying the crime, but celebrating the people who endure.
The final shots of the show are, perhaps, its most brilliant commentary on the true crime medium. It's a series of sequences pulling back from the tight focus on the talking heads, highlighting all the ediface --the cameras, the screens, the makeup, the lights -- and also pulling back from the made up rooms that they used repeatedly throughout that were all manufactured for the show to represent McNamara's workspace or bedroom, showing these sets being taken down, reminding us that even with this "true crime" examination there's a heavy level of artificiality to it, and that it's not the whole story that was put in front of us.
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