August 31, 2024

August 2024 Bonus Review: The Murder of Air McNair

the true crime that's worth your time

[CW: mentions of suicide; my review will also contain spoilers]

The crime
The 2009 murder of former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, possibly by one of his girlfriends, Jenni Kazemi – whose body was found with McNair's, and who according to Nashville PD took McNair's life and her own – but possibly…not? By Kazemi?

The story
Untold: The Murder of Air McNair dropped earlier in August, but I didn't feel any urgency in reviewing it – or in watching it at all. For one thing, the story of McNair's untimely demise isn't "untold." Sports Illustrated's debut in the narrative-podcast space, Fall of a Titan, covered the case in detail and at length six years ago. 

I reviewed that pod in a Blotter Brief at the time, and what I said about the podcast is more or less what I'll say about this installment of Untold, to wit: sometimes, a case is more or less what it appears to be. If it doesn't have anything else to tell us, about the victims or the justice system or the media, of course that doesn't mean it isn't a tragic, traumatic criminal loss of life. It may mean that it's not a good use of narrative time, for creators or consumers. That's the case with The Murder of Air McNair.

This isn't a knock on first-time directors Rodney Lucas and Taylor Alexander Ward, either, but the other thing that informed my lukewarm attitude towards checking Air McNair out is the parent show itself. I've enjoyed Untolds before – Malice at the Palace and The Girlfriend Who Didn't Exist, among others – and I appreciate that the franchise's take on sports-world crimes and scandals contrasts with 30 For 30's. This is too broad a generalization, probably, but I would characterize Untold as straightforward, literal overviewing of a story, and 30 For 30 as a more figurative and artistic attack…Wikipedia vs. The New Yorker, maybe? Each one has its place, but only one is going to have my eyeballs the day it drops, and that one isn't Untold. 

In Air McNair specifically, Untold's more workmanlike and straight-ahead style doesn't serve the story especially well. Fall of a Titan used private investigator Vincent Hill's alternative theory of the crime as a jumping-off point; in Air McNair, Hill doesn't show up until the last ten minutes of a doc that's only an hour long in the first place, and as far as viewers of Air McNair can tell, all there is to Hill's alternative theory is that there is an alternative theory. It's implied that a third party, who admitted furnishing the gun, was involved, but we're not walked through how, or given any possible whys. 

And prior to Hill's first talking-head interview slagging Nashville PD, Air McNair spends a lot of time hitting various highlights of McNair's football career, overexplaining why his murder made headlines but giving us no real context for his importance to the NFL. Former head coach Jeff Fisher does his best, but in the end, I felt like either Air McNair is actually two documentaries, one about the player and one about the murder victim, fighting each other in a one-hour sack; or like McNair was a very good but not especially iconic QB who is primarily remembered today because he got killed, and because the documentary doesn't want the second part to be true, it's not giving us an accurate picture of the first part.

Certainly I have zero sense of McNair as a person. Towards the end of the hour, a former teammate sighs that McNair "as a man" and how he made people feel should be his legacy, not his murder. In theory, I don't disagree, but in practice, literally all Air McNair tells us about McNair "as a man" is that he 1) cheated serially on his wife, and on his girlfriends with his other girlfriends; and 2) was the kind of guy who, when his lady friend gets pulled over for DUI, ditches out from the passenger seat so his shit doesn't show up on TMZ, and then doesn't send a ride back for her. So…trifling. 

The wee small hours bring out the trifler in almost all of us, Lord knows, and for sure nobody deserves to get killed over it, but Air McNair doesn't tell us much else – not the relative significance of McNair's career, not how he adjusted after his playing days, not who else might have killed McNair besides Kazemi, is this an access-to-illegal-firearms problem or a retired-athletes-making-bad-bored-choices problem or a sometimes-you-gaslight-the-wrong-gal problem or what. I've got no kick with a brass-tacks "the cops say X, the private dick claims Y" story-telling, but there's a space at the center of this one that makes it hard to engage.

Untold is, with a couple exceptions, a property you pour a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle out in front of, on that one day at the beach house where it's sheeting rain, and you just have it on in the background while you hunt for edges. Air McNair isn't one of the exceptions; it'll just go around you and on its way. Until that downpour comes, no need to seek it out. — SDB

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