Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel

The scripted visuals here fill things in quite well because Berlinger keeps them weird and odd, like the hotel itself. ... Considering the complexities of the Lam case, plus the Cecil Hotel’s history, no one can claim that Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel is padded out. We’re actually wondering how they’ll cover everything in 4 episodes.

There are times when “Crime Scene” leans too much into that mindset of salacious true crime obsessives, but I believe it’s for the greater good in the end, illustrating how many of the conspiracy theories around Elisa Lam were misguided at best.

With too much crammed into even a relatively lengthy four-hour running time to drive home its most salient points, The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel ends up being a tragedy wrapped in a mystery shoehorned into paranormal nonsense.

It’s a shame that it takes so long for the show to understand what makes this particular crime scene compelling — or, even worse, that it relishes validating the most salacious details and theories before deigning to do its case, and the woman at its center, true justice. If “Crime Scene” weren’t too busy spinning a wildly compelling yarn, it might have been able to do something far more interesting in taking apart the true crime obsession that makes this hotel and case such phenomena at all.

What Crime Scene needs is much more of Doug Mungin, a Skid Row urban scholar, and much less of almost everything else. ... There's just a way to do a commentary on the corrosive effect of true-crime voyeurism without being so pervasively voyeuristic, and I wish Crime Scene had walked that tightrope more deftly.

We’re served an uncomfortable, crude murder mystery. There are some redeeming qualities, though you have to pay rather close attention to notice them. Contributors are wide-ranging and forthcoming, especially the hotel manager Amy Price, who comes across as bewildered, defensive and excited to be on Netflix all at the same time.

The basic facts of Lam’s death are so upsetting, that Crime Scene’s various attempts to lighten the mood with historical detours and commentary from cutesy eccentrics such as the general manager with the Veronica Lake wave, feel, at best, in very poor taste. It is not spooky, it is just sad; desperately sad that a family have lost their beloved daughter and sad, too, that in Los Angeles, as in many other places around the world, the result of human beings in a mental health crisis is avoidable tragedy.

While there are essentially two stories here, neither is told in a terribly compelling way. ... “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” falls in love with the crime lore aspects of the case, and feels more exploitative than revealing. ... The series makes a point of interviewing at least two guests from that time who recall the funny taste of the water when brushing their teeth, repeating much of what they’d already said in contemporaneous news clips included in the series.