Essays on TV and film — exploring stories, characters, and the choices behind them.
In 2009 a law professor named Dan Markel published a book about families and criminal justice. Its argument was blunt. When the law gives someone special treatment because of who they are related to, the costs add up fast, and courts should grant far fewer of those exemptions. Five years later Markel was shot … Read more
Mica Miller, the 30-year-old wife of a South Carolina pastor, was found dead at a North Carolina state park on April 27, 2024. Authorities ruled it a suicide, and the documentary does not dispute that. So if you came looking for a hidden killer, Death of the Pastor’s Wife is not that kind of … Read more
Yes. A Child of My Own, currently the fourth most watched film on Netflix in the United States, is built on a real case, and the true story is colder than the soft one the movie opens with. For its first stretch, the film plays like a warm melodrama about a woman aching to … Read more
Yes, The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is based on real events, and the woman in the title lived through them. Monica White is a real person. In late 2020 she matched with a man named Anthony Robinson on a dating app, dated him for a few months, and ended it in … Read more
Joe Berlinger has spent years pointing a microphone at America’s most infamous killers and letting them talk. The Ted Bundy Tapes, The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, The Son of Sam Tapes. Each one hands you the voice of a man who did the killing with his own hands, and the … Read more
In the summer of 2016, strangers started showing up at a condo in Anaheim, California, expecting sex. A Craigslist ad had invited them. A woman there, it said, wanted to act out a rape fantasy, and any resistance she put up was part of the game. The men were real. The ad was not. … Read more
On the night of 21 December 1988, a bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, and 270 people were killed in the air and on the ground. What followed became the largest criminal investigation in British history. The Bombing of Pan Am 103, … Read more
Most true crime hurries toward the person who did it, angling for the interrogation room, the profile, the scene where a detective finally explains the mind behind the knife. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, the three-part Netflix series that landed on July 29, walks the other way, and that decision is the most interesting thing … Read more
Yes, it is a true story, and that is the first thing most people want confirmed. The woman at the center of Hulu’s My Grandfather Charles Manson is Sophia Maddox, a real filmmaker and actress, and she really is the granddaughter of the man who orchestrated the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. The documentary, number one on … Read more
A police officer stops a woman on a Texas road for speeding and driving like something is very wrong. She tells him she has just given birth. There is a newborn in the car, and the baby is real. Almost nothing else she says that day turns out to be. That traffic stop is where … Read more