Saturday, July 14, 2012

TV Recommendation

I had seen this show advertised, and then Fran (my fellow true crime aficionada) brought it up to me. It's on Wednesday nights at 10 pm Eastern. There's been three episodes, none of which I saw when they ran, but now I've seen them via On Demand.

They are true crime stories, and the twist is that the show is narrated from the victim's perspective. It's part re-enactment and part reality where there are interviews with the prosecutors, police, witnesses, family members, etc. along with film of a trial or an actual news broadcast.

Of the three, I really liked two of them and shut off one of them -- just didn't hold my attention, but if you like true crime, I think this is worth checking out.

I don't normally like re-enactments -- I always want to see the real thing, but these use real-looking people for the actors. And there's an odd and compelling bonus at the end. When the credits run, the actors who played the parts in the re-enactments sit there in a chair holding a large black & white portrait of the real person he or she has portrayed. Whoever does the casting has done a marvelous job in that some of the actors look uncannily like the people they play.

2 comments:

Mary Mc said...

Are the victims still alive? I wasn't interested because it seemed like pure speculation.

Pat said...

No, this is true crime and the victims are dead so their words are recreated... so one of them starts, "I never thought I would die this way..." The dead victim narrates parts of the story. I avoided it for the same reason you did -- just resisted the pure hokiness of it, but after Fran brought it up, I gave it a try and thought it was well done.