Piper Weiss and I waded into basic cable's accidental anthropology this week, starting with MTV's new extension of a heritage non-fiction show, True Life Crime . It's got potential, and we'll keep watching, but we couldn't help wondering if the network was giving a lot of Dateline- y notes -- and if the show in its original inception involved a lot more of the late Zachary Stoner. Later, we looked at Love/Life After Lockup , and questioned WEtv's intentions. Is it trying to make an acerbic comme...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Mark Blankenship discussed the first season of Surviving R. Kelly on the podcast, and kindly returned to unpack the second season. Is the additional testimony, and our bearing witness, the point? Could a different organizational strategy have made Part 2 more effective? And what drives the people who take to the streets with signs to defend Kelly and his ilk? Later, we talked about singer-songwriter Allison Moorer's memoir of her parents' tragic deaths, Blood: A Memoir . Mark read the book and I...
Jan 08, 2020•1 hr 4 min
All the true-crime properties that were worth MY time last year, from The Act to Zeman. "Special" "appearance" by Bear E. Williams! SHOW NOTES Abducted In Plain Sight: https://audioboom.com/posts/7349289-brief-36-abducted-in-plain-sight “Caught Up In The Act” on Primetimer: https://www.primetimer.com/features/caught-up-in-the-act At The Heart Of Gold: https://audioboom.com/posts/7349273-095-at-the-heart-of-gold-and-cold Bundyville: The Remnant: https://longreads.com/bundyville/ Catch & Kill:...
Jan 01, 2020•22 min
Jeb Lund returns, but probably wishes he hadn't, because we're talking about Apple TV's Truth Be Told , a property that may think it brings Serial to mind, but is actually a lot more in line with the estranged-from-reality journalisming of one Brandon Walsh. Have the creators never watched even part of a procedural? Why does the series contain EVERY possible story about this family? And is every agent involved getting fired? It's bad, is our point. 2018 Netflix series Dark Tourist is better, but...
Dec 18, 2019•1 hr 2 min
The latest L.A. Times/Wondery joint project from the Dirty John team, Detective Trapp, may be a podcast in search of a Sunday magazine; Kevin Smokler and I talk about old-media effortfulness, why "merely good" is sometimes great," and narrative choices. The same topics come up again when we look at Rachel Monroe's Savage Appetites , as we ponder difficulty ratings in non-fiction, the power of teenage girls, and how Monroe makes "old" crimes new again. In a nutshell (not that kind), that's The Bl...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 14 min
It's a six-pack of DVR clutter this week as I let you know what I'm granting a continuance...or a motion to dismiss. Netflix's latest on Henry Lee Lucas, plus a Frontline on a predator on the reservation, a doc on Oakland PD, the continuing fascination with the murder of Martha Moxley, yet more JonBenét Ramsey theories, and a new hope for the oldest profession. Get ready for some justifiable deletions, people: it's The Blotter Presents, Episode 123. SHOW NOTES A year of Best Evidence is just $52...
Dec 04, 2019•28 min
[CONTENT WARNING: language; discussion of child sexual abuse investigation] Toby Ball is back to talk about two fairly recent podcasts: the first, a departure from politics for Slow Burn, as the podcast's third season delves into the still-unsolved murders of Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur. Am I too impatient with a project that is, after all, called "Slow Burn" -- or are the attempts to give far wider context to these murders too unfocused? And ARE these killings ever going to get solved? Later...
Nov 27, 2019•58 min
Stephanie Green is back to discuss Netflix's latest original docuseries, The Devil Next Door , in which John Demjanjuk may or may not have been a Nazi extermination camp's Ivan The Terrible...and his true identity may or may not have been the point of the series. How is trauma "remembered"? Why did the U.S. consider some war criminals "useful"? And what did Demjanjuk really do between 1942 and 1952? Later, we talk about two different takes on crowd-solving cold cases: CrimeCon's "true crime expe...
Nov 20, 2019•51 min
The Preppy Murder is Sundance's five-part look at the murder of Jennifer Levin by Robert Chambers, and how it gripped New York City for years starting in August of 1986. Guest Piper Weiss and I remember those headlines well, but the miniseries corrects our memory on some points -- though we're still not sure why this is coming out now, or why Linda Fairstein's participation isn't asterisked in some way. In the Cold Case section, Piper and I revisit one segment of Zeman and Mills's Killer Legends...
Nov 13, 2019•1 hr
It's another Wondery podcast up top this week -- I'll try not to make a habit of it -- as guest Eve Batey and I contemplate American Elections: Wicked Game. Eve thinks the deep weekly dive into every single U.S. election, and the adjacent chicanery/felon...ery (?), might have worked better with visuals, while I confess I've still never seen/heard Hamilton but think the podcast is primed to get really good with a few tweaks. But is it crimey enough? We'll compare it to existing properties so you ...
Nov 06, 2019•59 min
I'm on my own for a round-up episode, reviewing 1) the latest from Wondery and Dr. Death's Laura Beil, Bad Batch; 2) a documentary about twin mind and malleable memory, Tell Me Who I Am , that just hit Netflix; and 3) a 2017 crime-oir, Sarah Perry’s After The Eclipse . SHOW NOTES Bad Batch: https://wondery.com/shows/bad-batch/ Tell Me Who I Am : https://www.netflix.com/watch/80214706 After The Eclipse : https://amzn.to/2Nm8Uqq The Forensic Files ep on Crystal Perry's case: https://www.youtube.co...
Oct 30, 2019•28 min
The five-part documentary series from Starz, Leavenworth , looks at the very complicated case of Clint Lorance, and after the first episode, guest Jeb Lund and I were a little impatient with the painstaking set-up -- but mostly because we wanted more of the textured, compelling stories that all converge on a single incident in 2012. Will we keep watching? And should you? Later, we revisit what's probably an all-time top-ten true-crime topic: the 1962 escape from Alcatraz, this time as considered...
Oct 23, 2019•56 min
Paul Holes joins the Oxygen family with The DNA Of Murder ; Blotter Holes-ologist Mike Dunn joins me again to talk about the new show, and whether it's really anything new at all. Was local law enforcement just waiting around for Holes and Yolanda McClary to help them out on the Burkert/Atkison case? Why didn't anyone catch the toothpaste detail before? And why can't two criminologists make their theory of the actual crime make sense? Later, we discuss another project headed up by two criminolog...
Oct 16, 2019•1 hr 7 min
New "con-gregational" podcast Scam Goddess kicked off last week with Paul F. Tompkins joining host Laci Mosley to talk about Anna Delvey, and Stephanie Early Green joined ME to talk about the newest comedy-convo crime pod on the block. How is it possible PFT never heard of Anna Delvey/Sorokin? Do comedy podcasts about true crime need to be better researched? And did you expect to get a wire-transfer primer on The Blotter Presents? Spoiler: you get one, "you're welcome." Later, we contemplated th...
Oct 09, 2019•49 min
Toby Ball and I took on two newish podcasts this week: the first from WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times , Motive, looks at the strange case(s) of TJ Jimenez. But is a competent, ambling narrative -- one that might have worked better as a longform magazine piece -- enough during peak true-crime? Unraveled returned with a fourth season last month, and we're talking about that season, "Snowball," in the second Most Wanted section. Snowball builds its timeline differently from Motive, doesn't try as ha...
Oct 02, 2019•49 min
It took me and AB Chao a little longer than most people to get around to Unbelievable , but it lived up to its name in the best ways, nailing us to our seats and making us think about elegant exposition, acting choices, and everything SVU tries to get right and misses on. It really is "that good." Our other Most Wanted topic, Parcast's latest podcast Sports Criminals, isn't just not for us in the way Parcast content can sometimes be; it...really is not good, unfortunately. We tried to figure out...
Sep 25, 2019•47 min
Dr. Marcia Chatelain joins me for the first time to talk about a first for Showtime: the network's foray into the true-crime-series space with Murder On The Bayou. The five-part series looks at the so-called "Jeff Davis 8" -- their lives, their deaths, what connected them and what didn't -- as well as at small-town class divisions, the economies of addiction, and the pointlessness of task forces. Later, we discussed Betting On Zero , the 2016 documentary about Herbalife, and financier Bill Ackma...
Sep 18, 2019•1 hr 14 min
Netflix's recent documentary series, Happy Jail , looks at daily life and administration inside the Filipino detention center whose famous Dancing Inmates re-enacted the Thriller video so virally a decade or so ago. There are so many stories to choose from here, but Eve Batey and I agree that the production doesn't do well at organizing them, interrogating the issues in play, or giving us context for what we're seeing as it compares with life behind bars in the U.S. 2001's Ghosts Of Attica , rec...
Sep 11, 2019•1 hr
(Not the Chris Christie thing; the card game.) John Ramos returns to dig into a podcast from Andrew Jenks on the college-admissions bribery kerfuffle, Gangster Capitalism. Is documentarian Jenks learning the audio-narrative format on the job? Do episodes improve as you go along? And does that Loughlin stan have her priorities in order? Later, I get into it with John, a bridge pro, about the cheating scandal that rocked bridge in 2016: what it meant for the game at the higher levels, how it chang...
Aug 28, 2019•59 min
Mindhunter returned for a second season on Netflix last week, and I talked with Will Leitch about the gifts director David Fincher brings to this kind of narrative, who's the real heart of the FBI BSU story, Fringe reunions, and whether the Li'l Tench, Creep In Waiting storyline worked for us. This section does contain spoilers for the second season, so if you haven't watched yet, skip ahead to... ...the Cold Case section, where we're talking about 2009's The Informant! , a genre-busting take on...
Aug 21, 2019•1 hr 4 min
(Content warning for suicide and addiction issues.) Alex Segura somehow made time amongst his new babies -- a human AND a just-published last book in his Pete Fernandez series -- to talk about Leah Carroll's 2017 Down City , her memoir of her childhood after her mother's murder when Carroll was just four years old. The subject matter, which also includes her alcoholic father's decline, is rough going, but the storytelling is flawless. Alex and I talk about the poetry in austere prose, transition...
Aug 14, 2019•1 hr 2 min
Why is law enforcement so interested in bringing cases against a hip-hop star when he's alive...and not as interested in solving the case when he's dead? Eve Batey is back to talk about Amazon's Free Meek , which takes on the story of Meek Mill, punitive probation, an activist judge with opinions on remixes, and how "police contact" and the art of rhymes feed each other. But is Free Meek as good at telling Mill's true-crime story as Mill himself is? In the Cold Case section, we dig into the ReMa...
Aug 07, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Sundance continues staking out space in the prestige-true-crime space with No One Saw A Thing , a six-parter on the killing of Ken Rex McElroy in Skidmore, MO in 1981 and what that's meant to the town since then...but although it's well made, Allison and I agreed that both-sides-ism and a certain cynical willingness to let correlation be causation undermined the series overall. Are you better off with MacLean's In Broad Daylight ? Another small town struggles with the legacy of an unsolved case ...
Jul 31, 2019•59 min
Toby Ball and I liked Uncovered: The McMartin Family Trials well enough, but we still wished Oxygen were less whodunnit and more whydunnit in its coverage of this most famous of Satanic-panic cases -- how it got so big and lasted so long. We'll never know what really happened...so why not spend more time on why THIS was allowed to happen? The second season of Bundyville gives us just the Frontline -ian perspective we craved, but without underlining its own conclusions. After investigating the re...
Jul 24, 2019•1 hr 5 min
...Why is Nancy Grace so successful? What is the point of her new Oxygen joint, Injustice With Nancy Grace , a show that complains about the very rushes to judgment in which she usually specializes? Does she make these grand banal pronunciamentos about pure evil at home, like after she walks through a spiderweb or something? Lani Diane Rich is back to help me tackle those questions. Later, we preview Who Killed Garrett Phillips? , and while we may not get an answer to the titular question, we CA...
Jul 17, 2019•1 hr 24 min
Erin Lee Carr has had a busy year, but I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter proves she's not too busy for nuance. The two-part documentary film, airing this week on HBO, looks at both sides of Conrad Roy III's tragic death, acknowledges the human instinct to find someone to blame, and takes us back to our own gusty teenage girlhoods. "Enjoyable" isn't the right word, but it's evocative for sure. Paul Schrader's late-eighties look at Patty Hearst and the SLA is less so, but w...
Jul 10, 2019•1 hr 8 min
Showtime's 16 Shots looks at the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014, and why this police-involved shooting galvanized Chicago. Kevin and I talk about the excellent access filmmaker Richard Rowley gets on both sides of the issue; give suggestions for police procedural manuals; and wonder when the "a few bad apples" line of rationalizing will stop getting trotted out. Another police-involved shooting, of a police officer, and the injustices that rolled downhill from it are the topic of Errol Morris...
Jun 26, 2019•1 hr 28 min
I'm so glad I could finally welcome Omar G to the TBP guest chair...and that it was to talk about David Lowery's The Old Man And The Gun , a charming joint about a senior bank robber and escape artist, Forrest Tucker, that flew totally under our radar last year. It shouldn't fly under yours, though; it's fun, smart about managing story, and elegantly shot, and an American legend is having the time of his life in his last go-round. And the movie's based on a New Yorker story by the great David Gr...
Jun 19, 2019•59 min
Did we close the door on the centenary episode with a bang, or a whimper? ...Whimper, I'm afraid. Toby Ball kindly made room in a packed day to join me for two Cold Case properties, the first a feature film about the Paradise Lost case, Devil's Knot , that doesn't know who it's for, what it wants to say, or how to fit a Shoah -size story into a feature-size runtime. Also, who just has a picture of Robert Johnson in his office if he's not a blues musician? We hoped the second film, All The Queen'...
Jun 12, 2019•56 min
Ava DuVernay's four-part masterpiece, When They See Us , hit Netflix last weekend, introducing us to the boys and men who survived getting railroaded for the 1989 "Central Park jogger" attacks; to the outsize acting talents of Jharrel Jerome, Asante Blackk, and many others; and to what it's like to cry when you see Coney Island. Piper and I discussed all that, plus innovations in flashback writing, in the Most Wanted section, but our words won't do the series justice, so just go watch it. But TA...
Jun 05, 2019•58 min
