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Mixed:
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Critic Reviews
Uncle BarkyJan 4, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Do expect an absorbing tale of justice rendered but not necessarily justice served. Its star players have no formal acting training. But for better or worse, they all look born to play their real-life roles in another true crime drama that knocks fiction for a loop.
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Dec 23, 2015
Season 1 Review:
As far as longform journalism goes, it’s something of a masterstroke. Ricciardi and Demos deliver a decade’s worth of assembled surveillance footage, interviews, press conferences, police interrogations, courtroom testimonies and more, so much information in fact that the series feels like it’s racing to deliver it all even with a 10-hour-plus runtime (Making a Murderer feels like it could have gone on for hours more).
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Dec 21, 2015
Season 1 Review:
It's a sprawling small-town saga that, nonetheless, feels lived-in and intimate. And even as it succumbs to some of true crime's greatest faults, it's always less interested in the gruesomeness of the crime than in the impossibility of finding the truth, something that serves it well. This is grim television, but it's also necessary television.
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Dec 18, 2015
Oct 19, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Murderer has clearly learned some lessons from season 1, and the new episodes attempt to anticipate sources of potential backlash and parry them pre-emptively. ... Whether or not Murderer helps Avery and Dassey or seals their fate, it remains a vital reminder of the need for transparency in the criminal justice system. But the series never loses sight of the many human tragedies at the center of this ongoing legal saga: The murder of a beloved young woman, Teresa Halbach.
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Oct 23, 2018The Daily BeastOct 19, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Ricciardi and Demos employ sober, straightforward aesthetics to scrupulously detail every aspect of their tale, never better than in late sequences in which Zellner explicates her theory about the actual fate that befell Halbach. Much like lawyers arguing in front of a jury, the directors present their findings with exhaustive precision, even as they craft a larger panorama of the case’s sprawling cultural connections and impact.
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Dec 21, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Making a Murderer doesn’t have that arresting peg of the audience surrogate, which can so often be a galvanizing force in and out of a dense journalistic tale. But it’s worth observing that while Making a Murderer is more detached than those other docuseries—with a very uncinematic, nonfiction, brass-tacks style—the series also can’t help but evoke some other critically acclaimed series of the past few years.
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Dec 18, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Clearly, Ricciardi and Demos are on the side of justice, attempting to shed light on the dangers of imperfect police work and the very real potential for conspiracy. But when they showcase the awful thrill with which some members of the media reacted to the "great story" of Avery's second arrest, it's tough not to see a double standard. It is a great story, which is why they and Netflix chose to tell it.
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Dec 17, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Episodes build to key revelations or legal turning points and they sometimes exceed the standard hour boundaries and as propulsive as episodes are, they feel substantive, but also still trimmable. The series has an urgency, but in that urgency there's also an occasional sloppiness.
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Dec 17, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Demos and Ricciardi serve their subjects well, but they also serve their case well. They take complex legal subjects and make them interesting, boiling down mundane legal bureaucracy into a cohesive story that still is able to treat all victims--no matter what side of the cell bars they are on--with respect.
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Dec 16, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Even in the age of the high-quality limited series, it’s rare to come this close to the feeling of reading a book--immersive, compulsive and unpredictable, but also exhausting and sometimes mundane and repetitive. For the most part, the series’s novelistic qualities carry the day.
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RogerEbert.comDec 16, 2015
Season 1 Review:
It is so determinedly not flashy that it may be too dry for some viewers—it’s ten hours of one case, in the end--but Making a Murderer illuminates so many issues with violations of authority, failures in our legal system and, ultimately, what could be genuine evil, that it should be required viewing for anyone considering entering any aspect of the legal profession.
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Oct 19, 2018
Season 2 Review:
If Making A Murderer is primarily focused on proving the innocence of Steven Avery—a seed that was sown three years ago--it’s because the show and its filmmakers genuinely believe in him and in the justice system. It’s a surprising through-line, this kind of enduring optimism in an institution that has allegedly failed both Avery and Dassey many times over. Defense attorneys are a force for good in this story.
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Dec 18, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Like recent true-crime exposes NPR’s “Serial” and HBO’s “The Jinx,” Murderer is an absorbing look at a bizarre case that seems to shift with almost every new talking head. It’s an addictive, scary indictment of small-town policing and a warning to those poor or marginalized by their neighbors.
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Dec 16, 2015
Season 1 Review:
Although the story moves slowly and much of the content consists of recorded phone calls, we want to know if Steven Avery was set up, if Brendan Dassey was involved in Teresa Halbach’s murder. We may think we know the answers, but by the end of the fourth episode, we’ve also witnessed enough out of nowhere surprises to accept that real life doesn’t follow a script.
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Oct 19, 2018
Season 2 Review:
As entertainment, Murderer remains expertly made, its seductive slow pace gripping viewers by the neck; as morality play, its terms are kept blunt and simplistic enough by Zellner to come through. As advocacy, though, it achieved precisely the opposite of its mission from the start. Building a season around a few years of thwarted Avery and Dassey appeals, cases blunted by the very enthusiasm that the show fostered, ends up lacking much of a point at all, beyond sustaining itself as a TV show.
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Oct 19, 2018
Season 2 Review:
Part 2 is the equivalent of fan service: further confirmation that they're innocent, demonstrated by an even more painstaking examination of the flawed evidence against them. But for those with a more casual interest in the cases and the true-crime genre they helped spawn, the sequel is a lesser version of the original, with the same style and trappings slapped on a less-compelling story.
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Dec 13, 2018
Season 2 Review:
The docuseries is so hindered by its own blind spots that by the end of the season, it seems to be chasing its own tail, lost in a world where it only sees what it deems relevant, permissible, or just. It would be worthwhile for this series to encounter, and try to interpret, its own warped reflection.
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