Making a Murderer

Scott Hardie | February 4, 2016
Once again, I find myself wondering whether to finish a Netflix series. I have now watched three episodes of Making a Murderer. While the show is well-made and has a compelling true story, I just find it horribly depressing. These are real people suffering real injustices by a criminal justice system that just keeps tightening the noose when they resist. Even if Steven Avery really committed these crimes, the civil rights violations by police in the rush to inculpate him are enough to make one's blood boil. My anger and frustration cannot be redressed, however, so they just curdle into depression, and I feel like jumping off a bridge each time I finish an episode. Is my experience unique? Does the show get easier to watch? I'd look this up for myself, but I'd prefer to avoid spoilers unless I'm sure that I'm done watching the series. As it is, I'm pretty close.

Scott Hardie | February 4, 2016
I've watched every single episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Kelly wonders how I can watch a series that depicts such gruesome cruelty and suffering. I tell her it's because almost every episode of SVU has a happy ending: The detectives solve the crime, the bad guy gets prosecuted, and justice is served. Making a Murderer feels like the opposite: Justice is denied, innocent people suffer, and bad guys get away with it, and unlike SVU, it's a 100% true story.

Aaron Shurtleff | February 4, 2016
I really need to get Netflix someday...

I have been kind of curious about this show, actually. When I first heard about it, I wanted to look up the story (because, again, no Netflix), and the story I have found is sparse on details. Which I guess works in the OMGNOSPOILERS world today, but I find it irritating (which might be the point...get viewers to watch by not giving easy access to details).
And, let me be frank here, a lot of what I can find is either super vague or SUPER speculative. Like "THEN WHEER IS BLUD??!?" conspiracy theory type stuff. (Trying no to spoil even ridiculous stuff I read) As I originally stated, haven't seen it, but how hard factual is it?

Samir Mehta | February 4, 2016
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | February 5, 2016
Netflix has been a major source of our entertainment for a while now, and several of their original shows are outstanding. We just signed up for Hulu Plus and we're enjoying that too, mostly for the bounty of recent episodes that we can't get on Netflix. Technically we also have Amazon Prime but we have yet to try watching that, because we have barely scratched the surfaces of the other services yet. :-)

Samir, I'm sure the difference is mostly a matter of personalization. A few months ago, almost nobody would have cared that some Wisconsin county officials maybe railroaded an innocent guy, but now that the show has made Steven Avery famous and America has spent ten hours watching every mundane detail of his story unfold, that has changed. Also, as you once said, empathy is expensive: Avery looks and behaves more like a typical uninformed American than a victim of the international drug war.

Aaron Shurtleff | February 5, 2016
I think the reason people find stories like these so intriguing is that, to a certain extent, the crimes are more cut and dry. Murder? Murder is bad. Railroading a possibly innocent man? That's bad too. Sure, you might be able to justify or mitigate some of these things (at least murders, maybe...I'm not sure you can justify sending innocent people to prison), but rarely, and it would take a special circumstance.
Drug use? Weeeeeeeell... Seriously. There's too much gray area to make an interesting documentary, I think. If this was about a guy in jail for drug trafficking, half the people would say, "Good. You peddle drugs, you go to jail." and the other half would be "Aw! Drugs aren't that bad. We shouldn't break up families for this." Water cooler talk at work would get testy, people would argue!

Scott Hardie | February 5, 2016
I think you're on to something, Aaron. Netflix has a series about the drug war, and it looks a lot more flashy and entertaining than the visually dull Making a Murderer, and yet it was not a phenomenon the way the other series was. The moral gray area might have been a factor in that. One of the reasons why I personally don't make room for drug-war shows and movies in my viewing, even critically-acclaimed (and friend-acclaimed) titles like Sicario, is the moral compromises that are usually made by the heroes, such that all parties involved wind up doing some pretty awful things. It's not that I can't watch protagonists doing bad things (The Sopranos remains a favorite show of mine), it's that it feels, well, predictable, when seemingly every show or movie in the genre goes through similar motions. It's the same with undercover-cop stories; they tend to follow similar arcs and generate similar tension through similar scenes of near-exposure, so much so that I have zero desire to see another one.

Samir Mehta | February 5, 2016
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | February 7, 2016
All excellent points. Perhaps part of the problem is its massive scale: We can fret over one poor Wisconsinite getting screwed by the system, but we feel powerless to stop the drug cartels. They'll just keep extorting and killing, and they won't be stopped by violence (more will take their place) or prosecution (officials are bribed). The one thing that probably will stop them, legalizing drugs, seems like an impossible fairy tale to many Americans, like Bernie Sanders's brand of socialism. I don't think most average Americans can take seriously the idea of ending the drug war.

One of the democracy's downsides is that the people must be moved to solve a problem. We (collectively as Americans) don't feel responsible for the drug war or its messy consequences, and we certainly don't feel like hypocrites. The powers that be aren't going to make us feel that way in order to get us to address the problem. We aren't going to be any more honest with ourselves about the consequences of our drug hypocrisy than we are about the consequences of our obsession with guns.

I feel like I'm addressing this too generally while you're applying more specificity and thoughtfulness, but all the same, I agree with you.