The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox

There have been documentaries and other programmes made about the case, so did we need a drama lasting several hours about it 18 years on? Probably not. But Knox probably needed, and has earned, the catharsis. Maybe this will put an end to it.

While there are aspects of The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox that we found annoying and unnecessary, we appreciated how Grace Van Patten portrays Knox, showing the aspects of her personality that annoyed Italian authorities so much they sent her to prison for murder.

Created by K.J. Steinberg (“This Is Us”), the series is well-acted, well-written, impressively mounted, tonally contradictory, chronologically disjointed, overlong, stressful, exhausting, interesting both for its subject and stagecraft, and briefly inspirational.

For the most part, “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” doesn’t add enough new to the conversation for anyone who knows this story or has seen the very good Netflix doc titled simply “Amanda Knox.”

Van Patten (Nine Perfect Strangers, Tell Me Lies) does an admirable job with limited material. Yet .... For all its fidelity to the complicated facts of one of this century’s most infamous murder cases, Twisted fails to deliver the one element of Knox’s story that might be best expressed through scripted drama: insight into who its viciously caricatured, widely misunderstood subject really is.

There are some solid performances in the ensemble cast, but the series’s guiding Knox-innocent viewpoint, combined with Knox’s direct involvement, makes the whole thing feel like its primary objective is buffing out any remaining dings and dents in her public image rather than providing a new angle on a story we’ve heard many, many times over.

So much of what the drama tells us is true – Knox was maligned and mistreated, she was wronged and slandered, she had her life ripped away from her and transformed into something beyond her control and was courageous throughout it all. And yet by shoving these ideas down our throats, by turning her accusers into pantomime villains or bungling idiots, the drama does Knox a disservice.

For all the creative team’s personal intentions, The Twisted Tale’s sluggish pace, frustratingly narrow focus, and bizarre tonal shifts hold it back from becoming a definitive version of this tale.