May 2023 Bonus Review: Who Killed Robert Wone?

The crime
On August 2, 2006, D.C. attorney Robert Wone was found stabbed to death in a Dupont Circle townhouse where he was overnighting with friends. His murder remains unsolved.

The story
Peacock’s Who Killed Robert Wone? is an eminently watchable two-plus hours, somehow, despite 1) having no answer to its titular question and 2) making a handful of non-fatal, but still notable, unforced construction errors. I’ll take the second part first (and it gets spoilerish from here, so if you’d like to avoid learning too much before watching it, you can skip to my last graf now).

Wone is split up, for a streaming service’s usual compulsive reasons, into two episodes instead of just presenting itself as a feature; very determined cellos on the soundtrack try to manipulate the viewer’s levels of tension, poking us in the ribs with a bow at the act breaks; director Jared P. Scott (Requiem for the American Dream) periodically resorts to basic-cable AV tropes — a “dramatized recording” of a verdict, accompanied by b-roll of a tape recorder; a prosecutor staring glumly at crime-scene photos spread out dramatically, and implausibly, on the floor of the townhouse bedroom in which Wone was killed