Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi spent a decade on Steven Avery, and Part 1 is patient, plainly made and hard to stop watching. It is also a defence brief that never admits to being one, and Part 2 spends the patience Part 1 earned.
Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi followed the Steven Avery case for ten years and cut what they found into ten hour-long episodes, released together on 18 December 2015. Nobody narrates. The two of them never appear. The story is told by the people in it, by courtroom cameras and by Avery’s own voice on a prison telephone, and it is told slowly, in the order it happened. Part 1 is good television, better than most of the true-crime that followed it, and it has a problem at its centre that we will come to.
Demos shot it herself and edited it too, and the look is consistent because one pair of eyes chose it. Manitowoc County in winter is flat fields, bare trees and a sky the colour of dishwater, and she does not prettify any of it. The salvage yard is rows of wrecked cars under snow, filmed from the road as if the camera were not sure it was welcome. Court is fixed cameras and fluorescent light. The prison calls play over slow drives and old family photographs, and the music under them is sparse enough that you notice when it stops. It is a plain style, and the plainness is what makes it convincing.
The defence lawyers, Dean Strang and Jerry Buting, are the nearest thing the series has to leads, and it is easy to see why viewers took to them. They are tired, courteous, mid-western men who believe their client and know how that sounds. Demos and Ricciardi give the trial hours rather than minutes, so you sit through the forensic testimony, the arguments about a key and a vial of blood, the long pauses while a witness reads a document. We expected to be bored by this and were not. The detail is the point; by the time the lawyers stand up to argue, you have seen enough to argue back.
The moment that stayed with us is not in the courtroom. Partway through, the series shows a recorded police interview with a teenager, at length, without commentary, and we were angrier watching it than we have been at anything on a screen in a long while. We will not describe what is said. It is the way the room is arranged that does it: two adults, one boy, and nobody in the boy’s corner. Demos does not cut away or add music. She simply lets the tape run, and it is the strongest editing decision in the series.
Now the problem. Everything in Part 1 is filmed from Avery’s side of the table. The prosecution gets its hours in court, but outside the courtroom nobody speaks for it; the people who explain what happened, in interviews and on the telephone, are all people who want him out. That is a choice, and a legitimate one, but the series never says so. It presents itself as a record when it is a case for the defence, and a viewer who does not know that will come away certain about things the film has only implied. We were carried along, and afterwards we were slightly annoyed at how far.
Part 2 arrived on 19 October 2018, another ten episodes, with Kathleen Zellner, a Chicago appeals lawyer, now running things. Zellner is a formidable presence and a gift to a camera; she talks in headlines and stages experiments on cars and blood and bone to test the state’s story. But the experiments start to blur into one another, the family scenes repeat what the first series did better, and there is no trial to give the hours a shape. What took ten episodes to build in Part 1 is stretched over ten more with less to show for it. We watched it to the end out of loyalty, and loyalty is not the same as interest.
Set against the genre, this sits below The Thin Blue Line (1988), which did more in ninety minutes and was honest about its method, and above most of the streaming true-crime that copied its length without its patience. Watch Part 1 over a week rather than a weekend; the slowness works better when you have to wait. Treat Part 2 as optional. And keep in mind, all the way through, that you are hearing one side of an argument, told well.
