A peek over the paywall
Dopesick, Sherry Pie, JonBenét, and Fred and Rose West
the true crime that's worth your time
Today in our fall break programming, we’re republishing four of our previously-paywalled items for everyone. They’re reviews and commentary from our three-plus years doing this newsletter, which is basically a century in Substack years. — EB
First published on October 15, 2021, Dopesick is available in full on Hulu.
The crime
From my review of Beth Macy’s Dopesick from last year: “At the moment, technically, the crime is possession and distribution of opioids. Really, it’s that the entire Purdue Pharma power structure belongs in jail.”
The story
I liked the book a great deal, while wanting to kick many of its subjects in the slats; I feel a sort of inverse way about Hulu’s eight-part miniseries, namely that I want to hug many of its subjects while wanting to like the docudrama more than I do. It’s an all-star cast, I usually like creator Danny Strong’s work, you can’t argue with the directorial talent on tap (Barry Levinson, among others), and after the first three…it’s not that it isn’t good. It’s…too much good. Vulture’s Jen Chaney gets near it in her lede:
The saga of the opioid crisis in this country, the how and why behind the pharmaceutical epidemic that tore through American communities and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, is a huge narrative. Hulu’s Dopesick, a new limited series based on Beth Macy’s book Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, attempts to dig into all of it, with often moving results. But its vastness eventually becomes its Achilles’ heel.
This is my issue with it. It’s not poorly done, or particularly slow; the individual story threads each work extremely well, with a couple of exceptions: the angry mob of Q-Tips for some reason perched on Peter Sarsgaard’s head, for one, and the too-frequent instances in which a pair of actors is obliged to hit the tape marks and lock their joints for an expositional exchange like, “I helped that company make billions selling drugs … Black kids selling weed to go to jail for decades” or “what seems like corruption is just how the system works.”
All true, all the point, all beneath what the acting corps is trying to do here, and I think this is the central dilemma of Dopesick as a narrative: it wants to adapt the book faithfully in the sense that the book’s lessons get across, but seems to have lost sight, somewhat, of the fact that the performances have already gone 85 percent of the way to doing the important parts of that.
I like Michael Keaton’s warm, textured work as the amalgamated Dr. Finnix, and I want to spend time with it. I want to spend time in Kaitlin Dever’s story, and see if her dad (Rectify creator Ray McKinnon) can make any progress; I want to marinate in these lives as they’re lived, because the portrait of these people and these places isn’t condescending or misery porn, just reported and felt. I like the procedural aspects of the Sarsgaard and Rosario Dawson/law-enforcement sections of the story. Michael Stuhlbarg as the chief culpable Sackler is bloodlessly perfect. Watching Dawson and Raúl Esparza make out is never going to be a bad time. But alllll of these things together is…too many things.
The worthwhile parts — the acting; the positioning of addicts as victims and Sacklers as gelid monsters — mostly make up for the clumsy parts, minutes and minutes spent in sales-force seminars that underline the entire Big Pharma concept so hard that the paper rips. But as a whole, do I recommend it?
If you didn’t read the book and you’d like to look at a dozen top-notch actors practicing their crafts, absolutely. If you did read the book and you’ve been told (by me) that you can skip certain sections involving Amber’s salesbitch-on-wheels (Phillipa Soo is great; her storyline plods), absolutely. If your post-millennial tolerance for Mazzy Star is relatively high, absolutely. But Dopesick needed to give itself over to one, maybe two of its intersecting stories and let all the other “evidence” be discovered therein. It’s ambitious, evocative, and sublime in that Romantic way at times, but it’s also afraid it’s going to forget to mention something, when everything it needs to care about is already there. Try it, but if you fall away from it, that’s okay too. — SDB
First published on March 10, 2020. RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 12 is available on Paramount+, VH1, and Amazon Prime
Viewers of RuPaul’s Drag Race are watching the prelude to a true-crime drama play out before their eyes. The reality competition show kicked off its 12th season on February 28, but less than a week later, BuzzFeed reported that one of this season’s contenders was allegedly behind an elaborate scheme involving impersonation, fraud, and sexual coercion.
Joey Gugliemelli, whose drag name is Sherry Pie, allegedly pretended to be a casting agent named Allison Mossey (spellings of the name vary from report to report) who contacted men and asked them to submit audition tapes for various projects, in some cases using her “assistant” (Gugliemelli) to film them in sexual situations, ostensibly for the role, NBC News reports.
The news broke just a day before the show’s first episode with Gugliemelli aired, and the show prefaced the episode with a title card that read, “In light of recent developments and Sherry Pie’s statement, Sherry Pie has been disqualified from RuPaul’s Drag Race. Out of respect for the hard work of the other queens, VH1 will air the season as planned. Sherry will not appear in the grand finale scheduled to be filmed later this spring."
She did, however, appear prominently in the subsequent episode, with numerous talking heads, copious praise from the judges, and — say attendees at viewing parties across the country — boos from viewers. It’s hard not to wince at every appearance she makes, especially as since BuzzFeed made its first report, Queerty says that at least 30 more alleged victims have come forward.
If the allegations are true, this is a person who’s engaged in a longstanding pattern of sexually predatory behavior, who is seen remarking on the sexual attractiveness of other competitors, throwing shade, and being lauded by folks like unwitting guest judges Thandie Newton and Robyn. As Jezebel says, her presence casts an “ominous cloud” over the entire show — a matter that’s certainly not the fault of RuPaul, the show’s producers, or the other queens. But there it is.
Reality TV has a rich history of contenders who are later found to have engaged in disgraceful behavior, but — perhaps because Drag Race holds itself above those pedestrian products, even as it embraces their tropes — it’s somehow harder to watch a guy who allegedly contacted multiple men under a pseudonym and talked them into using sex toys and masturbating on video be showered with praise than watch a White Lives Matter t-shirt model seek a Bachelor’s love.
But what is the show to do? An op-ed in Out says that Gugliemelli’s disqualification “isn’t enough,” and suggests that, in light of her alleged crimes, “VH1 and World of Wonder are going to have to spend some extra money in doing a new edit” to “edit around her, removing the queen’s talking head spots, as well as scenes and exchanges built around her that aren’t essential to the competition, putting that spotlight on some of the show’s other queens.” Is that the way to go, or is there a better approach the show can take to make the scenes that include Gugliemelli feel less distressing? — EB
First published on January 20, 2022. JonBenét’s Tricycle is available for rental on Vimeo.
The crime
The day after Christmas 1996, six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was murdered in her home in Boulder, CO. The case went tabloid supernova almost immediately, and has not been far from the headlines since, but as of this writing, the murder remains unsolved.
The story
I don’t know why I got a PR email about JonBenét’s Tricycle, “a quirky documentary feature film by first time filmmaker and Colorado native” Andrew Novick — or why I got it now. IMDb lists the film’s release year as 2018, the film itself lists its copyright date as 2017, and it’s evident that many, if not all, of the talking-head case-overview segments were filmed in the middle of 2016…so JonBenét’s Tricycle isn’t a new release.
A push to resurface the film around the twenty-fifth “anniversary” of JonBenét Ramsey’s death would have made sense, but I didn’t get the email until that date had already passed, and the email doesn’t mention that milestone in the second place. Do I have a reputation for a greater openness than some to “off-label use” of the documentary format to explore the true-crime genre in a meta way? Maybe, but the “Dear Esteemed OFCS Member” greeting wouldn’t suggest that that’s in play.
It doesn’t matter; I took the bait, and I don’t regret it. JonBenét’s Tricycle bills itself, in part, as “an investigation of the human urge to possess what we value and the impact that pop culture and the media have on our experience of tragedy,” and while I don’t know that the film reaches any definitive conclusions, 1) I think that’s no small part of the point, and 2) the investigation is very watchable.
Novick is the filmmaker, but also the “star” of the doc, of sorts, and how much you engage with him as the Virgil here may depend on your tolerance for the kind of self-described “Mile-High legend” and “provocateur of wackiness of all sorts” who took the stand as an expert witness about Peeps. My impatience with his performatively fish-nor-fowl hairstyle notwithstanding, Novick is a pop-ephemera collector who at the same time is collecting responses to his collecting — who is interested not just in the ticket stubs or the Barbies or the KISS-iana themselves, but in the reactions to the grouped objects, and then in the reactions to his grouping of the objects. Collecting also collects…collective memory, in other words.
Lest I blunder too far into an overly abstracted “price =/ cost =/ value” Socratic monologue that’s several philosophical pay grades above my own, here’s the point: a story about a tricycle belonging to JonBenét Ramsey might sound fundamentally unserious, but while the doc doesn’t take itself all that seriously, it isn’t disrespectful. And it is, I think, trying to engage as seriously as it can with ideas about haunting, cursed things and places, and cultural memories.
Novick is interested in what things have meaning to us, and why, but he’s also interested in whether we have meaning to the things, which is how he and the viewer end up watching a series of mediums and paranormal investigators laying hands on Christmas decorations, as well as the titular tricycle, and delivering psychometric analyses of what happened to or near the items’ former owners. Helped along by a professor’s talking-head musings on how pop-culture studies and specifically the “murderabilia” trade can put the horrors of history “behind glass” and make them safer to consume, Tricycle starts a conversation about the meaning of objects, and the meaning of ownership, and the meaning of meaning.
Do the rituals and signifiers of tragedy help us to manage and distance our grief and fear per se, or because we expect them to? Or…both? Novick even plays on tropes of true-crime programming and ghost-story closure, closing with a sequence in which he and his producer leave the trike at JonBenét’s grave. It’s manipulative cheese, but at the same time, it’s affecting, because Tricycle understands the power and purpose of manipulative cheese, that being told where to stand and how to feel can lay a floor in the abyss. The slo-mo shot of the riderless trike is both too much and exactly right, both what we need and expect to see and an interrogation of why we need it.
JonBenét’s Tricycle isn’t slickly made; it has an inviting quality about it, a “let’s figure this out together, audience and I” energy that put me in mind of Mystery Show, and of the stories of the stories that come to a secondhand-bookshop owner. It’s trying to raise some questions, but it’s not trying too hard to sell the answers, or that there are any. There’s a sock monkey “control object.” It’s not quite like anything else in the genre, and then it gets you to reconsider everything else in the genre. The first two minutes is a veritable barrage of quirk-a fides, but if you can get through that, Tricycle is absolutely worth your time. — SDB
First published on October 15, 2019. Unheard: The Fred and Rose West Tapes remains available on all the usual podcast apps.
I think I know what happened with Unheard: The Fred and Rose West Tapes. Here’s my theory: journalist Howard Sounes, who was one of the first reporters on the case and the author of Fred & Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of Horrors, saw one or two or ten articles about how true crime podcasts are becoming a huge business and he thought “hey, when I was writing my book back in 1995, I taped a lot of interviews! I’ll bet I could turn them into a podcast!” Which isn’t, on its face, a bad idea -- I’m all for recycling, and I also prefer podcasts where the subjects speak for themselves, as opposed to listening to a host read transcripts from a discussion.
But here’s the thing: the content from Sounes’s admitted “cheap dictaphone” — aka “the Fred and Rose West tapes,” which so far contain neither Fred nor Rose — is a very tough listen. If you’re the kind of person who angrily tweets at podcasts with audio issues, you are not going to be able to handle this show. If you’re unbothered by bad audio, how’s your tolerance for redundancy? Because that’s the other issue: Since Soarnes clearly (ha) recognizes that the tape quality is ruuuuuff, he then repeats what was said. Here’s a dramatic reenactment.
Interviewee: garble garble Rose’s father hiss never hit her, not like underwater sounds he did the other kids
Sounes: Rose’s mother said that her husband, who frequently beat her and the other children, never laid a hand on Rose.
This happened again and again, which made me wonder why Soarnes didn’t just say, "Look, guys, the 25-year-old audio is too bad, but here’s a transcript” — hell, I’d even take a reenactment — “of the interview I did in 1994, go to [URL] to hear the original audio.”
Or — and I freely admit here that my knowledge of “cleaning up” audio comes mainly from CBS dramas — why not present the information from the interview in a straightforward fashion, have two or three bombshell quotes enhanced as much as possible, then drop those in?
Between Soarnes’s need to repeat the hard-to-hear bits from the tapes, as well as his seeming compulsion to use every inch of footage (do we really need to hear the part where people answer the phone and he introduces himself every single time) you’d think that I would have flounced off angrily after an episode or two. This is not the case! I listened to it all, which is indicative on how fascinating the bare bones of the case is.
Given that the crimes involve sexual abuse, multiple homicides of both women and children, domestic violence, and generally “deviant” behavior, Soarnes’s approach is quite respectful and isn’t as salacious as you might expect from a guy who wrote a book with “House of Horrors” in the subtitle (to be fair, Soarnes says he’s now embarrassed by that appellation). And he’s definitely thorough, and he really wants you to know that he chased down every lead he could (though sometimes to the point of excess — why spend five minutes explaining how you investigated what was determined to be a dead end?! Ugh sorry this is supposed to be the graf where I say positive stuff).
But, honestly, this podcast could easily be a quarter as long — and, in my opinion, pack a great deal more punch — if this show had had a good, smart editor to cut away the excess and leave us with the facts and Soarnes’s seemingly solid reporting. -- EB
Friday on Best Evidence: It’s the September budget sweep!
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