Detective Netflix

As I scroll past thousands of thumbnails on Netflix, I always find myself stopping at one type of genre: crime documentaries. It’s not that I particularly enjoy learning about the gruesome details of a crime, but 10 minutes into their morbid retelling, it’s impossible to look away.

Over the past decade, Netflix has accumulated millions of dollars and views on shows like “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” (2019), “Making a Murderer” (2015), and most recently, “The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann” (2019). While shows like “The Ted Bundy Tapes” scrutinize the lives of the convicted, the latter two were created to provide outsider insight that could possibly impact the future of these ongoing investigations.

Though the tendency to formulate theories about mysterious crimes and events past is completely normal, how do we draw the line between conjecture and fact? Documentaries don’t always thoroughly explain details of crimes; they aren’t police reports, they’re a form of entertainment.

After watching “The Ted Bundy Tapes,” I made it a routine to check if my doors were locked three times before going to bed. The documentary is well done, triumphant in fulfilling the curiosity of viewers, and it accurately recounts the murders committed by Ted Bundy while giving audiences a glimpse into his mind. The documentary covers the Bundy trial back in the ‘70s and the conversations that journalists Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth had with Bundy after his conviction in 1978. At first, it’s hard to understand the overall popularity of the documentary since it appears to be a general restatement of facts that were known to the public. A recording of Bundy started to play, though, and the hairs on my arm stood up. Documentarian Joe Berlinger does a remarkable job at highlighting the narcissism in Bundy’s words and discrediting all of his pleas of innocence.

However, there are flaws in the documentary. While it does share the story of a survivor, it doesn’t give a voice to the families of the dozens of victims who were murdered. Furthermore, the documentary overemphasizes Bundy’s charm and charisma, which can be misleading and dangerous to a fairly young audience that might leave with the message that Bundy was able to get away with his murders for so long because he was an average man.

Berlinger’s tendency to oversimplify is also evident in his film about Ted Bundy, which premiered as “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Zac Efron plays the role of Bundy, who is portrayed as a loving partner and father figure to Liz Kloepfer (Lily Collins) and her daughter, respectively. It is not until the final moments of the movie that the audience is exposed to Bundy’s inhumane acts. The documentary ends on a similar note with Bundy saying, “People don’t realize there are potential killers among them. How could anyone live in a society where people they liked, loved, lived with, worked with, and admired could, the next day, turn out to be the most demonic people imaginable?”

Both the documentary and the film, while attempting to paint an accurate picture of a renowned murderer, fail to do so. In the documentary, viewers aren’t presented with all the facts, creating a sense of paranoia and even more curiosity and attention than should be given to a killer who craved it. The film does the same by casting an actor who clearly did not watch the Ted Bundy tapes and could not accurately portray a psychopath.

Serial killers don’t appear out of thin air. They show warning signs such as pleasure in harming animals, stalking, and committing small crimes. The documentary doesn’t focus on these details, instead opting to cut them out in the editing room in favor of an entertaining project. While it’s a commendable effort to discourage audience members from putting on their detective hats and spying on their strange next-door neighbor, it causes quite the opposite effect because of the lack of attention to detail for realisticality.

Unlike “The Ted Bundy Tapes,” “The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann” outlines the details of an ongoing case. In 2007, Madeleine McCann disappeared at the age of three after visiting Portugal. The documentary speculates what could have happened to McCann, but fails in its final hurdle. It ends with the suggestion that McCann might have been a victim of a pedophile, without any valid evidence. The ending of the documentary is theatrical instead of informative, and is completely unsettling.

Each episode covers a possible theory that is so compelling it makes audiences believe they are something akin to detectives. Unfortunately, the documentary fails to provide any helpful information about the case and attracts unnecessary attention that can hamper with the investigation. Audiences are presented with theories without justification and a series of merely hypothetical scenarios. At one point, the documentary even suggests that McCann’s parents may have been responsible for the disappearance of their daughter.

This outlines a common issue with crime documentaries: they undermine the efforts of law enforcement by making it difficult to separate speculation from truth. In recent years, more documentaries have been leaning toward biased stances that formulate theories with little fact or evidence, thereby misinforming impressionable viewers. All this also proves distracting for actual attempts to solve the cases these documentaries discuss. Rather, documentarians should be presenting cases honestly, including as little of their own opinions as possible. Not only does this responsibly inform audiences of cases that revolve around such dangerous killers as Ted Bundy, but it also leaves all the truth-uncovering to law enforcement. Remember that the next time you rip open a bag of popcorn and check out a crime documentary on Netflix, you’re watching a show—the facts are on the actual police report.