What Really Makes Making a Murderer So Good? There’s No Narrator.
SlateMaking a Murderer, the true-crime series Netflix released Dec. 18, pushes viewers to ask many questions. Are interrogations like the one Avery’s 16-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey was subjected to—in which investigators planted ideas and cajoled the developmentally disabled teenager into confessing to things it seems impossible for him to have done—typical? There’s little doubt that the show’s sympathies are with Steve Avery; filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos spend time with Avery’s family and have access to his brilliant attorneys Dean Strang and Jerry Buting, while the prosecution attorneys refused to cooperate with them. Unlike the true-crime shows that clog weekend TV cable schedules, there’s no velvet-voiced narrator explaining what’s going on in condescendingly basic terms—once before the commercial break, then once again when we return to the show. But most importantly, the lack of voiceover makes the show’s indictment of the legal and law enforcement system around Avery even more effective; it lets Ricciardi and Demos communicate their message more subtly—without the willful instructiveness of Jarecki or Koenig’s narration—while still allowing viewers to feel as though we are weighing the evidence and deciding guilty or not guilty for ourselves.
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