A couple weeks after everyone else laid the subject to rest, Kevin Smokler is back to talk with me about Wild Wild Country , Netflix's six-part series on the poisonings, beaver-shakes, and other crimes against traditional values perpetrated by a free-love "cult" in 1980s Oregon. It's eminently watchable, but at the same time noticeably incurious about certain aspects of its subjects -- do the Way brothers try too hard not to take a position on either side of the myriad debates the series describ...
Apr 25, 2018•1 hr 21 min
Almost 15 years ago, de Lestrade's The Staircase paved the way for the Making A Murderer s and Jinx es after it with a lingering, textured look at the case against Michael Peterson. Did his wife Kathleen fall down the stairs? Did he push her or beat her with the notorious blowpoke? Was a wild creature responsible all along? And whose side are the filmmakers on as they slowly pile up the porn, infidelities, and other similar deaths in Peterson's past? Stephanie Early Green is back to talk about t...
Apr 18, 2018•58 min
Almost 15 years ago, de Lestrade's The Staircase paved the way for the Making A Murderer s and Jinx es after it with a lingering, textured look at the case against Michael Peterson. Did his wife Kathleen fall down the stairs? Did he push her or beat her with the notorious blowpoke? Was a wild creature responsible all along? And whose side are the filmmakers on as they slowly pile up the porn, infidelities, and other similar deaths in Peterson's past? Stephanie Early Green is back to talk about t...
Apr 11, 2018•57 min
Given when In Ice Cold Blood premiered -- April 1st -- you might forgive me for thinking it was Oxygen's PR team tryna prank me. And it...might still be that, actually! But it's a pretty long con, if so, since we got screeners, and based on the first two episodes, guest Eve Batey and I are kind of about it: it's an interesting niche in terms of the crimes covered; the talking-heads and interrogation footage are, while nothing groundbreaking, used well; and the production chose its topics smartly...
Apr 04, 2018•58 min
FX splashed out on some expensive talent to tell the story of the infamously cheap J. Paul Getty's negotiations for the return of his kidnapped hippie grandson -- whom he and many others thought had engineered the situation to get himself some spending money. The network's really put itself on the map with prestige-crime series in the last couple of years, but when the action moves to 1970s Rome, does it have itself another water-cooler show? Toby Ball and I plan to keep watching, but even if we...
Mar 28, 2018•57 min
When Michelle McNamara passed away unexpectedly in 2016, Mike Dunn and I both made sure to pre-order the book she'd left unfinished -- I'll Be Gone In The Dark , on a prolific rapist turned serial killer operating in two areas of California in the late '70s and early '80s. The book showed up at our houses a couple weeks ago, so we decided to turn the pod into a book club for an episode and discuss it...and then Investigation Discovery dropped its two-night, four-part take on the case, The Golden...
Mar 14, 2018•55 min
USA debuted yet another take on the still-open cases of the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "Biggie" Wallace last week, this one featuring pretty much every procedural Hey, It's That Guy! you can think of (Brent Sexton, Jamie McShane) plus a couple top names ( Black Mirror 's Jimmi Simpson, Josh "Mr. Fergie" Duhamel, Dwayne Johnson) (...right? hey, the IMDb doesn't lie), and a great deal of table-setting exposition to locate us in three timelines. It's a little heavy-handed about explain...
Mar 07, 2018•1 hr 11 min
The Huffs and I thought, based on the customary punnish titling of Love And Hate Crime , that we were in for predictable filler-y fare. We...were very much not, as a BBC-produced look at the murder of trans teen Mercedes Williamson by her much older Latin King boyfriend in rural Mississippi doesn't shy away from harsh crime-scene photos, even harsher language, and an unblinking look at the hypocrisy and denial of the community, not to mention Mercedes's killer. Fortunately, Allison unearthed A M...
Feb 28, 2018•1 hr 1 min
[ Note: Today's episode contains crackling that may annoy you. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working on ironing out the issue! ] A&E leans into its sub-branding as a cult-studies destination with Warren Jeffs: Prophet Of Evil . Dan and I leaned into the Warren Jeffs topic by watching not just A&E's outing but the 2015 documentary from Showtime, and discussed the similarities between LDS fundies and Scientology; what reminded us of Trump about Jeffs; Mormon naming conventions...
Feb 21, 2018•40 min
California law enforcement has former Hart To Hart star and current fossil Robert Wagner as a person of interest in the death of his then wife, Natalie Wood, in 1981. My valentine, Dan Patrick Brady, is back to talk about whether the 48 Hours on the case worth watching, or if phrases like "the Banging Dinghy Theory" sink the episode. And in our Cold Case segment, a vintage Unsolved Mysteries has an unexpected recent update of its own (and absolutely nothing new to say about Bigfoot). We accept W...
Feb 14, 2018•1 hr 4 min
Showtime enters an already tragically crowded field with The Trade , a comprehensive look at the business of heroin from poppy to police intervention -- and Eve Batey returns to the podcast to talk about the show's bleak effectiveness. If you've watched any combination of Live PD , Intervention , and any number of recent HBO documentaries, The Trade won't tell you anything new, but it's still a thought-provoking and well-built story about families, frustration, and how far the toxic effects of s...
Feb 07, 2018•51 min
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound is approaching, and with it comes a veritable barrage of material on Waco, David Koresh, and how it all went pear-shaped. Toby Ball and I selected two of the higher-profile, A&E's documentary event Waco: Madman Or Messiah and the just-born Paramount Network's big-splash mini-series starring Taylor Kitsch, Waco . Does either project make sense of the tragedy that took place in Texas in 1993? Do you need to watch both...
Jan 31, 2018•1 hr 7 min
As we approach the tenth anniversary of Travis Alexander's murder, Jodi Arias is back on our teevees in ID's Jodi Arias: An American Murder Mystery . It isn't really a mystery, and neither is the pervasive misogyny and black-and-white narrative manipulation that turned a confused and off-putting young girl into a scheming black widow, but returning guest Kevin Smokler and I found it very watchable, in the workmanlike way of this series. Later, we go back almost thirty years to the murder of Rebe...
Jan 24, 2018•1 hr 22 min
American Crime Story returns after a triumphant first season with an all-new mid-nineties crime, and Tara Ariano returns to discuss it, and whether, after 20 years, we should accept that sometimes there is no "why." We'll also be discussing whether Sarah's the only one who thinks Édgar Ramirez as Versace looks AND sounds like Enrico Colantoni; if it's appropriate to covet a character's clothing if that character is a spree killer; and the question of The Nose in Penelope Cruz's portrayal of Dona...
Jan 17, 2018•46 min
Oxygen starts 2018 with Final Appeal , which is basically MTV's Unlocking The Truth with different personnel and slower pacing. Did Patty Prewitt kill her husband? What's going on with the threatening phone calls? And was key evidence seriously just sitting in a sheriff's office storage locker for nearly 35 years? We had a lot of questions about the Prewitt case, but not nearly as many as we still have after we've each watched legendarily unsettling HBO doc There's Something Wrong With Aunt Dian...
Jan 10, 2018•44 min
Investigation Discovery kicked off 2018 with an afternoon of premieres, and returning guest/enduring spouse Dan Brady and I took a look at two of them. True Conviction has an interesting premise -- but doesn't stick to it closely enough, falling into some crime-tabloid structural cliches instead of focusing on prosecutors and their work, plus host Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi keeps, well, leading the witnesses in talking-head interviews. Dan thinks it's good enough to fall asleep to... ...but had no use...
Jan 03, 2018•59 min
Looking to kill an afternoon with the fam -- or a whole holiday-hammock week with your crime-nut in-laws? Recs ahoy, as Sarah D. Bunting runs down her top tens for both movies and series that aired on TV in 2017. Strong showings as usual from Netflix ( The Keepers ; American Vandal ) and HBO ( Mommy Dead And Dearest ), a comeback in progress for Investigation Discovery, the overlooked highlights from Showtime and Spike, and honorable-mention listener favorites, all in a special year-in-review po...
Dec 27, 2017•30 min
At this time of year, thoughts turn to family...unfortunately. Kevin Flynn of Crime Writers On... and Law & Order pod These Are Their Stories joins Sarah D. Bunting for a discussion of the spare, bleak, thought-provoking documentary The Family I Had , a stripped-down look at the family destroyed, then rebuilt, by and around Charity Bennett after her 13-year-old son murdered her 4-year-old daughter. True, there's no mystery here, no whodunnit, but the ellipses left by the filmmakers, and by t...
Dec 20, 2017•55 min
I'd hoped to have John Ramos join me to talk about Final Vision , with Scott Foley as Jeffrey MacDonald, since MacDonald is a fellow college alum and Felicity is a show we both are very fond of...but Time Warner Cable wasn't having it, so I took John's notes and forged ahead on my own. I didn't get any answers to questions like "Who is this movie for?" and "Why did they put that angry Brillo pad on the back of John Doman's head like a graduation mortar?", but that's the gig sometimes. I hope you...
Dec 13, 2017•37 min
It's the mooooost murderous tiiiiime of the yeeeeear -- and if you think that's crass, wait until you hear Homicide For The Holidays 's episode-naming conventions. Stephanie Cangro pulls up a (polished) chair to talk about HFTH 's second-season premiere, "Thanks-Killing," and how soon we guessed whodunnit without Googling the murders of Earl and Terry Robertson in 1997. I was a little creeped out that two suspects shared the names of my uncles... ...who went to school with our Cold Case section'...
Dec 06, 2017•48 min
Dan Brady's back for a look at yet another Investigation Discovery joint, Village Of The Damned , a limited series on the strange and deadly cluster of tragedies that struck Dryden, NY over the course of a decade. We discuss the re-enacting, the evocative soundtrack, and whether the stories of the Harris family, the disappearance of Aliza Bush, and others might be better suited to a podcast than to TV. Have a listen to find out whether we'll keep watching past the first couple of episodes. Later...
Nov 29, 2017•54 min
We're talking about another Joe Berlinger project, and we're talking with Mark Blankenship again about it: Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders , an investigation of the murders that made, and perhaps broke, our first non-fiction novelist, and rippled through a family and a town. Later, we discuss a Mugshots episode on Robert Blake, who starred in In Cold Blood . Did he kill his wife, con artist Bonny Bakley? What is going on with his erstwhile roomie John Solari? And why have we never heard...
Nov 22, 2017•49 min
Eve Batey returns for yet another look at the Zodiac case, this one from History Channel -- is the much-ballyhooed new evidence and groundbreaking technology worth tuning in for? Or will the lack of context for certain "discoveries" frustrate viewers with any knowledge of the case? (And...all the other viewers?) Later, we discuss AHS 's season-long remix of notorious cults and criminals, including a radical-feminist theory on the Zodiac, and make predictions -- which will be proven wrong by the ...
Nov 15, 2017•53 min
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Nov 15, 2017•30 min
Is The Lost Wife Of Robert Durst -- or, as Sarah D. Bunting billed it to her guests, Smash meets The Jinx -- worth the two hours? Panel of Smash experts Tara Ariano, Adam Grosswirth, and Kevin O'Keeffe weigh in on the case narrative, bad wigs, worse accents, and who this movie is for. Later, the group pitted famous cases against each other in King Of "Notorious Crime: The Musical" Mountain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Nov 08, 2017•38 min
As the jury struggles to agree on a verdict against Lyle and Erik, Leslie and Jill struggle to balance work and family, and Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting struggle to understand why the emergence of the OJ Simpson case is handled so badly in the penultimate episode of the season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 08, 2017•31 min
On The Case With Paula Zahn returns for its 16th (!) season, and Dan Patrick Brady returns to the podcast for a reminiscence of...well, how we used to use the show as a sleep aid. Assessing the show's coverage of the 1989 Roundy/Gray case in Idaho Falls, we complain about inaccurate auto re-enactments; marvel at the piddling insurance payouts that murderers are motivated by; and theorize that Paula Zahn has never been in the same room as her interview subjects. (We are NOT crackpots.) Later, we ...
Nov 01, 2017•41 min
Episode 6 of The Menendez Murders sees the Menendez brothers getting very real about the abuse they (allegedly?) suffered, as well as knock-knock jokes, Oziel talking back to the TV the same as we do, and terrible blocking and flashback wigs. The show's clearly picked a side vis-a-vis Lyle and Erik's justification for killing their parents, but do Tara and Sarah pick a side vis-a-vis whether that works narratively? It's all in the latest The Blotter Presents: Summary Judgment. Learn more about y...
Nov 01, 2017•27 min
Episode 5 of The Menendez Murders centers the action on the courtroom -- but with two juries, a dozen pointedly pastel sweaters on the defendants, and myriad clanky lines of dialogue, Sarah and Tara find the writing guilty of amateurish checklisting. On the plus side, there's a top-notch portrayal of post-Princeton snottiness, Dominick Dunne shade given and received, and Dr. Oziel's foray into the poetic arts, and we're discussing all of it in the latest TBP: Summary Judgment. Learn more about y...
Oct 25, 2017•26 min
Netflix's new series, Mindhunter , gets off to a slow start as it chronicles the evolution of a profiling program we have come to take for granted in true-crime narratives, but Anna Beth and I are going to stick with it, despite some over-explaining and an annoying girlfriend for the protagonist. The Eleven we're not so sure about, as the melodramatic VO seems to have crowded out some essential exposition in the first episode of A&E's latest limited series on a notorious case -- and Ed Bell'...
Oct 18, 2017•35 min
