- Network: MGM+
- Series Premiere Date: Jul 26, 2020
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The six-part Helter Skelter: An American Myth is the most comprehensive documentary on Charles Manson and his pathological family, the most thorough, and the most fascinating. It's excellent journalism and great television.
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Epix has a series (Sunday nights through August) that makes a fine companion piece to Tarantino’s tale of the end of one era and “the coming darkness” of another, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.” It’s a good primer on the time, the crime and the criminals that Quentin Tarantino liked to imagine “Old Hollywood” could vanquish, like the villains in the third act of a TV Western.
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Her own strategy is fresh, if exhaustive. ... What Ms. Chilcott intends, and achieves, is a careful, meticulous assembling of background that sidesteps the sensationalism that usually attaches itself to the case and gets in the way of what it all was and how it happened. And maybe even why.
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The challenge, at times, is figuring out when Helter Skelter: An American Myth is intentionally accentuating the unknowability and mythologizing of Charles Manson and when those things are byproducts of questionable choices or limitations in the filmmaking. ... When Chilcott is able to balance first-person narratives, an assemblage of earlier interviews and curated archival footage, Helter Skelter: An American Myth is gripping.
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Helter Skelter is full of detailed backstory and an impressively deep archive of vintage materials. ... The series’ structure, however, is not as impressive. ... It’s so committed to detail, it forgets about insight.
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After decades of coverage devoted to the Manson family, anything new on the topic must clear a high bar. Other than having time to flesh out the subject matter, the six-part Epix documentary "Helter Skelter: An American Myth" falls short of its promotional promise to "upend what people think they know" and cast the story in "an entirely new light."
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An American Myth might’ve worked better as a leaner, more daring essay film. The premiere contains quite a bit of material that’s recycled in later episodes, to the extent that it feels like an hour-long trailer. More frustrating is that in avoiding voice-over narration, Chilcott makes her point through interviews that can contradict one another.
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The cumulative effect of the exhaustively researched six-part Helter Skelter douseries is numbing, more miss than myth. ... Obsessives might dig it, but others will see it as overkill. [8 - 21 Jun 2020, p.5]