Making a Murderer

Judging by the first four episodes, though, it’s not only a gripping true-crime story, it’s also the most moral one I’ve seen in a long time.

It's as engrossing as they come, impactful and devastating, and it left me with a hollowed-out despondence generally treatable only with alcohol and ranting.

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.

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).

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.

What it lacks in terms of sensationalism and gloss, it makes up for by possessing that very quality every Netflix show aspires to have: bingeability. The series begins slowly, but after grasping enough names and faces, you start feeling a sense of total immersion.

It’s hard to hit pause on Making a Murderer once it’s rolling through the queue.

“Riveting” is an overused, even lazy, term in criticism, but it’s hard to think of one that better applies to Making a Murderer, Netflix’s stunning 10-part documentary.

Every bit as gripping as this year's earlier docu-series hit, Making a Murderer is the anti-The Jinx.

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.

Making a Murderer is at its best when it taps into our collective fascination with the grisly details of a story that may read like fiction, but isn’t.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The twists and turns on Making a Murderer are so crazy and real that the series stands on its own.

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.

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.