February's story roundup: Hillsong, Pornhub, and more
How did the month end so fast?
the true crime that's worth your time
It’s already time for February’s budget-doc cleanup. This is when we take everything we’d meant to get to in recent weeks and clear the deck completely, so we can have a fresh start in the new month. This month, that means a lot of Bad Men, some follow-ups on properties we like, and multiple trailers. Shall we? — EB
Phoenix Rising | Official Trailer | HBO [YouTube]
The trailer for the first of a two-part documentary on allegations against Marilyn Manson (real name: Brian Warner) dropped late last week, as well as the show’s release dates: Part 1, Phoenix Rising: Don’t Fall airs Tuesday, March 15 at 9 p.m. Part 2, Phoenix Rising: Stand Up airs Wednesday, March 16. Both episodes will be available to stream on HBO Max as of Tuesday, March 15.
The Trojan Horse Affair: how Serial podcast got it so wrong [Guardian]
I praised The Trojan Horse Affair, that podcast from the NYT/Serial folks, earlier this month; now here’s a counterpoint from the UK pub’s opinion page. Columnist and political operative Sonia Priya Sodha says that the show “breaches the standards the public have the right to expect of journalists, with cruel consequences for those it uses and abuses along the way,” and that it presented long since dismissed “conspiracy thinking” as fact.
XXX-Files: Who Torched the Pornhub Palace? [Vanity Fair]
Pornhub co-founder Feras Antoon was nearing completion of his new home in April 2021 when a fire destroyed it, a blaze investigators believe was arson. It was a “21-room mega-mansion: 11 bathrooms, nine-car garage, 6,000-square-foot ballroom and sports wing” being built in an area known as “Mafia Row, a secluded road where at least a few local Cosa Nostra bosses had resided.” Did Antoon set it himself? Was it a mob arson? Or a fire started by folks pissed off at porn?
The end of the month is nigh, and you know what that means…bonus-review poll time! What’s Sarah going to review for you next month?
Apple TV+ announces new true crime documentary series “The Big Conn” [Apple press release]
This four-part doc from James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte (McMILLION$. that’s them in the clip above) is about Eric C. Conn, whose name you might recall from American Greed: Biggest Cons. Conn was a Kentucky billboard lawyer who (per Apple) “defrauded the government over half a billion dollars in the largest Social Security fraud case in history.” All four episodes of the docuseries will be released on Apple+ on May 5, and there’ll be a companion podcast on Apple Podcasts, too.
New documentaries Moors Murders and Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders keep banging the drum on gruesome cases that need to be left in respectful silence [Lancashire Post]
Reviewer Phil Cunnington writes that two recent docs that aired on UK TV are not worth your time, which means I will not schedule a flight to England to watch them any time soon. The shows are Moors Murders (on Channel 4) and Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders (on ITV): the crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and Peter Sutcliffe, respectively. “Both claimed to reveal new secrets and hidden facts,” Cunnington says, “but that was simply a bad reason to go over old, bloody ground.”
Secrets of The Chippendales Murders Premieres Monday, March 14 at 10pm ET/PT [YouTube]
This clearly non-sensational take on the quite zeitgeisty tale of dance troupe founder Steve Banerjee’s alleged crimes is a four-episode doc that promises “a look beyond the bright lights into a dark world of drugs, arson, a love triangle and a murder.” It drops on A&E on March 14.
Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed Docuseries to Air on Discovery Plus March 24 [Christian Headlines]
This three-part docuseries dives into the beloved-by-celebs church (my favorite acolyte is Chris Pratt, who seems totally normal and fine!). Per a press release from last year, “weighing in on Hillsong Church’s alleged exploitation, abuse and coverups are former Hillsong pastors, volunteers who witnessed the corruption and a student who was assaulted by a Hillsong employee.” We’ll hear their claims on March 24, when all three episodes drop only on the Discovery+ streaming platform, which I really don’t want to subscribe to so uuuugh.
CrimeCon Announces Inaugural Clue Awards for True Crime Content, Submissions Open [Variety]
So, the CrimeCon convention is set for April 30 at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, which, maybe it’s because I’m a snowflake San Franciscan but are we really sure we’re at the stage in the pandemic where conventions are a great idea? (Here’s the NYT’s tracker of case rates in the Las Vegas area, where the daily average is 386, a rate that suggests that “that cases are being significantly undercounted.”)
ANYWAY, at that event attendees will also see the first annual Clue Awards, which go to “the best of true crime content produced in 2021.” Nominations will be announced in April, with five categories in play: “outstanding episodic series, television; outstanding docuseries, television; outstanding episodic series, podcasting; outstanding docuseries, podcasting; outstanding documentary film; true crime book of the year; crime fighter of the year.”
HBO Max’s Award-Winning Podcast Program Announces 'HBO Docs Club' Series [HBO press release]
Sarah forwarded me this release with the plaintive addendum “everyone just stop.” I get why she said this — I understand wanting folks to understand how hard you worked on a project, but at a certain point, you have to let it fall into the archives.
However, this show — hosted by Brittany Luse and Ronald Young Jr. — sounds a lot like an exec thought there was still more to milk from what the crasser among us call “evergreen content.” How else are we supposed to think about a show that bills itself as a “deep dive into a wide variety of titles from HBO Documentary Films, past and present”? I don’t think I need to wander back through old HBO docs in search of…oh, hell, I don’t know. Podcast ad revenue? The show drops on March 21, and I will have forgotten it exists by the time this newsletter arrives in your inbox. [“Glad Luse is getting paid, but the 360-ing of content that doesn’t require it is exhausting.” — SDB]
‘Devoured’: Vice TV Unveils Food-Themed True Crime Docuseries Narrated By Jon Cryer, Sets Premiere Date [Deadline]
As the only professional food writer on staff here, I suppose I should check out Devoured, “a six-part true crime docuseries set in the world of food.” My first question is why Jon Cryer, an actor I had a lot of good will for before he soured me with his longstanding role on toxic masculinity normalizer Two and a Half Men, is the voice of this show, which “explores the foods Americans love while uncovering the sordid secrets and criminal pasts that restauranteurs, chefs, and foodies have tried to hide—recipe thefts, mob beatdowns, family betrayals, and murder.”
As I wrote this, I realized that it dropped on February 21 on Vice TV, a streaming service I am far less likely to subscribe to than Discovery+, so perhaps I am off the hook. If you watched it, I’d love your report.
This House Is Still Haunted: An Essay In Seven Gables [Dilettante Army]
This longread is a meandering (in a good way) and thoughtful meditation on how stories about haunted houses (both the intentionally fictional and likely false, like The Amitvyville Horror) help readers grapple with real crime. Here’s a snip from the piece:
Haunting, though, seems to promise some sort of redemptive violence, a plight that particularly affects the wealthy. The most famous haunted houses are large, many-gabled monstrosities in their own right, and the haunting of those houses provides a compelling narrative irony: the very possessions that protect the rich become their vulnerability. Who needs to eat the rich when they might be driven to eat themselves?
Under the Banner of Heaven | Official Teaser | FX [YouTube]
FX has released a trailer for Under the Banner of Heaven. This is the series “inspired by” (uh oh) Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name about (per Krakauer’s site) Mormon fundamentalist “brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl.” Amy Berg's 2015 doc Prophet's Prey touched on some of this story, too — Warren Jeffs, the FLDS cult leader at the center of her film, led the Laffertys’ sect.
FX’s logline says that “A devout detective’s faith is tested as he investigates a brutal murder that seems to be connected to an esteemed Utah family’s spiral into LDS fundamentalism and their distrust in the government. Andrew Garfield will star as ‘Pyre,’ an LDS elder who is committed to his Church and family but begins to question some of the Church's teachings through his contact with a suspected murderer.” I hope that “Pyre” bit means part of being FLDS is that you get to go by one name like Cher. No release date yet for UtBoH; all the press materials just say “soon.”
Peacock Launches ‘True Crime Tuesdays,’ New Content To Stream In March [Variety]
Peacock, I got you for a few days so I could watch Marry Me, but I have to draw the line somewhere. So, here’s the deal: the slightly redundant NBC streaming service is promising “new, true crime content … every Tuesday in March.” It all sounds pretty rote:
The collection will feature a slate of Peacock originals including “Perfect World: A Deadly Game,” “Preaching Evil: A Wife On The Run With Warren Jeffs” and “Sins Of The Amish.” Additional content will hail from NBC Entertainment and Oxygen — all adding to Peacock’s growing selection of true crime content, which currently includes “The Murder of Gabby Petito: Truth, Lies and Social Media,” “Aaron Hernandez Uncovered” and more.
Maybe I should have saved “zeitgeisty” for Jeffs instead of spending it on the Chippendales? It seems like he’s got a lot of coverage all of a sudden, too! The Amish “sins” are the child sex abuse allegations brought to light by Cosmopolitan’s (yes, the Cosmopolitan you’re thinking of!) Sarah McClure after a year-long investigation that culminated in this fantastic report from 2020, but Peacock’s press materials don’t reference McClure, so, hmm. [“Hi, it’s me again: can we leave Aaron Hernandez be for like a full calendar year? Please?” — SDB]
A&E Greenlights Investigative Documentary Event "Exposing Parchman" (WT) With Roc Nation And Good Caper Content [A&E press release]
This is a four-part doc about Parchman Farm, the facility the Innocence Project describes as “the Prison Modeled After a Slave Plantation.” You might have heard about this place on Netflix docuseries The Innocence Files, as the wrongly convicted Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer both did time there.
This new show focuses on a civil rights lawsuit filed against Mississippi Department of Corrections by 29 Parchman inmates (the class since has grown by hundreds), but will also show “how Parchman was built, how it was filled, and how it became the epitome of the dark history and the bleak present of America’s incarceration practices.” This sounds pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to it already; a release date has yet to be announced.
Tuesday on Best Evidence: Paid subscribers will get Sarah’s Bug Out review!
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