Fienberg vs. "Joe vs. Carole" · Five Families
And Carr, and King, and "COPS," and more
the true crime that's worth your time
We can’t review everything. It’s a matter of hours in the day, obviously, but it’s a matter, too, of focusing on the true crime that really is worth your time — and ours! — versus just talking about the same 10-12 properties the entire internet is signal-boosting. So that’s part of the reason I don’t have a Joe vs. Carole review for you today. The Tiger King cinematic universe ran out of things to tell us, even on a meta level about cynical leveraging of viral stories ad infinitum, months ago; my sense is that y’all don’t care either, so let’s think about something else.
The other part is that Daniel Fienberg emptied both barrels into the Peacock limited series yesterday at THR, and it is such an incisive and complete takedown that, if Fienberg is right about JvC — and his work can land a little sour for me sometimes, but I have no call to believe he’s off-base here — I can’t imagine what I could possibly add.
Fienberg’s utter dismantling of the series starts in the subhed, which nutshells the plot as the “rivalry between Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic, which captivated America between March 2020 and March 2020,” and it does not get any less withering from there. But it’s not a pile-on; Fienberg understands the problems in all the various iterations of the story, and that they didn’t necessarily bear “fixing” in the first place:
Tiger King was, itself, a somewhat padded monstrosity with limited grasp of the difference between examination and exploitation, an attempt to cobble together a narrative from footage that started off as one thing — an exploration of big cat ownership and its ickiness — and, instead, became a sensationalistic look at some cartoonish real people. If Joe vs. Carole lacks the good fortune of timeliness, the advantage it should have had was a 30,000 foot view of this story, the ability to parse where the substance was and maybe find introspection from source material in which there was none.
Unfortunately, series developer Etan Frankel falls victim to almost all of the same gawking instincts that plagued the docuseries.
He’s kinder to the performers than to the project, and understands that they made the best of a bad job — and can’t be blamed for the fact that the culture should have forgotten all of this sordidry by Thanksgiving of 2020. The same pandemic that turned the original Netflix series into a sensation in turn made shooting scripted content sufficiently difficult that execs could have taken a hint from Amazon and shelved the thing without anyone really questioning the decision. Could have, and should have. But it sounds like JvC has nothing new to tell us either:
It’s all treated without insight, and without any consistency regarding how much the show wants us to laugh and whether those laughs are with or at the main characters. And don’t get me started on the lack of reflection as to why this particular story even struck such a chord back in 2020. It’s mostly “This shit is crazy!” discourse; if you want something more poignant as an examination of two damaged people who chose to damage each other rather than seek healing, you may need to wait for the next interminable iteration.
I don’t think there’s nothing to This Shit Is Crazy! discourse, actually, when it comes to why certain cases take off in the public imagination and what environmental ingredients go into that. But you actually have to…have the discourse, and JvC is perhaps not a series that has that in it. And it definitely sounds like it doesn’t need me in front of it. — SDB
“Great, so: Dropout review’s up, yeah?” Yeah! …Not from us yet, though! The latest iteration of the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos saga hit Hulu today, and Eve is heading to Extra Hot Great next week to talk about it with me and the rest of the panel. In the meantime, here’s a snip from Slant’s Dan Rubins in his 3.5/4 review:
But what makes this retelling, adapted from Rebecca Jarvis’s podcast of the same name, so spectacular is how delicately and sparingly it fictionalizes the story. The details are strikingly unembellished, but it’s the perspective-shifting storytelling that brims with imagination.
I’m psyched to dig into it on the mic; in the meantime, feel free to chat about it here! — SDB
Thanks for choosing my March bonus-review topic: Running From COPS. It’s weird to me that it launched in 2019, a year from which I have, like, two memories, both of which involve getting a dog, so maybe that’s why I thought RFC dropped like last year? Anyway, I heard good things and I liked Taberski’s Richard Simmons podcast (even though it had a tweeness to its inception), so I’m looking forward to this one.
And don’t forget, anyone can vote on these, but only paid subscribers can read them, so get behind that paywall for that and all the other bonus content! — SDB
The History Channel has ordered a Five Families docuseries. If you’re asking yourself, “Self, who is going to watch yet another goddamn New York LCN televisual property??”, I regret to inform you that I am considering it, because Ray Liotta is executive-producing. It’s also got source-material cred — it’s hacky to call Selwyn Raab the OG of Five Families material, but he is; his Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires was an NYT bestseller, and the guy was still writing Mob obits as recently as 2020.
With that said, I would rather hear that Liotta is narrating than that he’s producing; that the series is skipping the Mafia’s Prohibition “ramp-up,” because it’s been done to death; and specifics on how it’s going to go series like Inside The American Mob or Fear City one better. I get that this is very possibly a response to/attempt to capitalize on a new generation of TV-watchers discovering The Sopranos, but it’s also past time for LCN-content creators to figure out any new framework for this topic. Like, do an A-Z thing, or one lesser-known Cosa Nostra figure for each decade/generation you plan to cover — anything but the same old Sicilian b-roll, cross-fade to sepia-toned photos of Little Italy, Luciano, Vegas, Gotti, zzzz. The network isn’t known for innovating, so my strategy is probably to dip in around the third episode and see if they do anything different. (No word on a premiere date yet, so remind me that I said this when the time comes.) — SDB
Holy Heist hits discovery+ March 15. The logline sounds like the set-up to a joke — you know, “a priest, a rabbi, and a penguin walk into a bar,” except the rabbi is a boxer, the penguin is connected to the IRA, and the bar is a Brink’s depot that got robbed of seven and a half million dollars. The documentary, per discovery+’s press release, includes
Never-before-seen interviews [that] reveal missing millions, international terrorism, and an unsolved murder in the Brink’s bank heist that liberated $7.4 million from an armored car depot. Now, discovery+ puts together the shocking pieces to the scandalous puzzle that’s still $5 million short and uncovers an unexpected cast of Irish lads linked to the crime.
I may not get to this one until later in the month, but if anyone pairs it with a Guinness and recommends we do the same, let me know! — SDB
I am shocked, stunned, and saddened that Erin Lee Carr’s latest, Undercurrent, somehow just got on my radar earlier this week. I did vaguely recall that Carr had this in the works, but combing our archives (to the extent that we can do that, and hey, Substack: love you, mean it, please fix the dang search) didn’t turn up anything from us on this two-parter, which hits HBO Max March 8. Here’s the trailer…
The doc “examines the disappearance and murder of journalist, Kim Wall, and the subsequent trial of her killer.” I love Carr’s work, and I really wish this weren’t coming out in the midst of one of the heavier barrages of prestige true crime we’ve seen since starting B.E. (And how funny that it’s coming out just a few weeks ahead of The Girl from Plainville — which is about a case I thought Carr more than covered in her unscripted feature from 2019.) Not sure it’s going to win the face-off with The Thing About Pam in my calendar… — SDB
Today marks 31 years since LAPD cops assaulted Rodney King. I don’t want to dwell too long on how little has changed in the intervening decades (…uch), but instead focus on some excellent and/or illuminating narrative about, and adjacent to, the attack on King — starting with the This Day in History mailer that reminded me of this “anniversary.” (Sidebar: we need a better synonym for that when it’s the date of a crime or death. “Anni-curse-ary”? Help me out here, smarties.)
It’s a rather difficult read, because it’s unstinting in describing the beating itself in all its excessiveness, which I think is important. Like, it takes a while to get through the description, which has a dark power that befits the event. (George Holliday, who took the video of the assault, passed last year. King himself died in 2012.)
There’s also
Slow Burn’s season on the uprising that greeted the 1992 verdicts;
King’s appearance on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, who is a shitbrick, and that show didn’t have anyone’s best interests top of mind necessarily, but I found King’s recovery journey very striking and sad, because his willingness to engage with the effects not just of the beating itself but of becoming a broader-strokes version of himself that also had to conduct lightning, in public, snuck a conversation about PTSD and the self-medication people of color would conduct into the show — which may not have cared that much about that conversation but at least allowed it to happen in front of rubbernecking viewers like, uh, me;
and of course the obligatory rec here from me of OJ: Made In America, but also of the Wired oral history of the project, which I must have seen before but it does seem new to me, and I don’t think we’ve linked it here either, but: see above re the search function, hee/sigh.
I hate that it’s a story we have to “stay on” after all this time, but it is, so: let’s. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Wood sued, Hank exonerated, and more.
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