- Network: Netflix
- Series Premiere Date: Aug 9, 2022
Critic Reviews
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I Just Killed My Dad is the rare true crime docuseries that tells a story that hasn’t been picked apart and retold over decades, and tells the story in a brief, relatively compact manner.
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[Director Skye] Borgman lays it all out before us with her customary consummate skill. She lets the participants speak their truths, while weaving in the practicalities and difficulties of the case via interviews with the lawyers. The way she frames and edits the story serves to challenge viewers’ assumptions along the way.
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Borgman recounts this with a standard mixture of interviews, crime scene photographs, and dramatic recreations whose dreariness is offset by sharp editorial cross-cutting. In particular, she benefits from the participation of virtually every principal player in this story. ... By its conclusion, I Just Killed My Dad transforms into a portrait of behind-closed-doors cruelty that’s chilling precisely because its perpetrator so easily concealed it from the world.
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It’s a relatively simple blueprint — but it takes a skilled director who knows how to lay out the story (and get the interview subjects to open up), as well as judicious editing, to maintain a focused and intriguing storyline. “I Just Killed My Dad” does all of that quite well.
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There are enough twists in Netflix's latest true-crime docuseries to keep audiences engaged, with another sensational case that's more of a whydunit -- given the killer's immediate confession -- than who.
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There are two aspects of Anthony Templet’s murder of Burt Templet that make it fascinating enough for a Netflix series: the history and the aftermath. Borgman’s docuseries spends a bit too much time on the former, sometimes repeating details in a way that feels designed to pad out a feature-length documentary into a series. But what’s particularly frustrating is that the most interesting story here starts when the series really ends.
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As a thematically linked companion piece to last month’s hit Girl in the Picture, which twisted and turned every few minutes until its viewers felt like a tangle of fairy lights, it is a sleeker, more introspective project. The only shame, then, is that it answers the easy questions but doesn’t even raise the difficult ones.