Killing Fields

[Rodie Sanchez is] so magnetic you’ll forget that this is an unscripted series.... Discovery sent one episode to critics, but it was enough to suggest that The Killing Fields should appeal to fans of both true-crime documentaries and fictionalized police procedurals.

Fontana and Levinson probably couldn’t write a better TV character than Sanchez or create a better TV setting than Iberville Parish.... What’s really missing is something Serial, The Jinx and Making a Murderer all had: a suspect.... In any case, Killing Fields at least generates anxiety and a desire to see what happens next.

The setting is exotic, and the characters are colorful in ordinary, workaday ways. The series' one real failing is that it doesn't completely trust them to carry the drama, laying on the high-volume audiovisual tics and tricks of reality television to remind us to be interested and excited. And yet it's the smaller, unvarnished, passing moments that sell the show--where its particular poetry, and even its comedy, can be found.

The people are real, the case is real, the place is real, and yet Killing Fields has the veneer of fiction to it--partly due to the natural tendency of human beings to view themselves as characters in their own stories, but also due to some unfortunately heavy-handed production choices.

Killing Fields relies on the kind of obviously staged or at least partly artificial action that typifies the reality-TV end of true crime.

An interesting mystery is hampered by over-production, scripted interview scenes and other signs of a show trying to please instead of just letting the action unfold.