Run Bambi Run: The Musical · Unfrozen Caveman Live PD
Plus the CBC on "Big True Crime," and more Cavett author beef
the true crime that's worth your time
Hashtag “MUST the show go on, really?” — it’s a pair of headlines from the genre’s theater department. The first one’s a bit vintage, as it’s from last month, but the West Village’s Players Theatre has picked up True Crime The Musical through the rest of the year. The next performance is Friday, if anyone’s in town:
The hit musical improv show True Crime the Musical has extended its monthly run at The Players Theatre through 2023. The show, which has been running at the theatre since 2021, is a unique comedy that combines music and murder to make for a hilarious evening in the West Village.
The show was created by Jillian Vitko and Maggie Lalley (Beautiful Dreamers Comedy) and premiered at The People's Improv Theatre in 2017. They've taken this one-of-a-kind show to theatres all across the US.
The second one has me straight-up paralyzed by all the puns available, so while you guys workshop a “run, Bambis, run to the box office” bit/email Eve all “look, Buntsy’s got to lie down,” I’ll write up the story real quick — Milwaukee’s Repertory Theater is debuting a Lawrencia “Bambi” Bembenek musical in September. The late Bembenek, who towards the end of her troubled life found herself caught (or so she alleged) in a Dr. Phil undertow, was
convicted of the 1981 murder of her then-husband's ex-wife, though many people fervently believe she was not guilty. Subsequent events included Bembenek's escape from Taycheedah Correctional Institution and her flight to Canada.
What could make this theatrical experience even more peak 1980s Milwaukee? Music and lyrics were composed by Gordon Gano, the lead singer and songwriter of the Violent Femmes.
For more on the case, a huge cultural preoccupation 40 years ago that had fallen beneath the awareness horizon until the Run Bambi Run podcast dropped last year, check out the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s longread on said pod, and its creator Vanessa Grigoriadis’s doubts about Bembenek’s innocence. — SDB
On Patrol: Live has gotten a 90-episode renewal. For those of you who had put the Dan Abrams infotainment complex out of your minds, a reminder: On Patrol, aka Undead Live PD, got placed at Reelz in the middle of last year along with at least one other Abrams-verse show (Court Cam, I think?).
Other commentators agreed with us then that the repackaging of LPD after a hiatus to let everyone forget they care about copaganda looked like a cynical backslide, but Reelz — whose programming slate includes anti-prestige content like Serial Psyche and Croc Terror — is unlikely to give a shit about anything but that gaudy demo number:
Though the premiere night in July was beset with copious technical difficulties, the show has since increased the network's audience 270 percent in the Adults 25-54 demographic.
As well, the network is likely in something of a “make hay while the sun shines” posture, given IP litigation surrounding the two shows.
The 90-episode renewal comes nearly six months after A&E filed suit against Reelz, saying On Patrol: Live was a "blatant rip-off" of their own Live PD, which was canceled in June of 2020. (The suit is still pending.)
Let’s not forget also that famous original Live PD, and other shows like it, faced recurring accusations of creating dangerous conditions during traffic stops and chases — and your Bay Ridge correspondent is not inclined this week, or really any other, to give a pass to Heisenbergian circumstances that force-multiply law-enforcement rashness and risk-taking.
In short: ew, and I hope some activist judge makes both parties put all their profits into a bail fund. — SDB
The crime
The murders of Hae Min Lee, Meredith Kercher, Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, George Floyd, and others.
The story
Our esteemed reader Sarah Weinman tweeted about the CBC’s hourlong doc Big True Crime months ago, but other reviews kept jumping the line ahead of this one, which I ended up thinking of as a treat I was saving for myself. The question it asks is, after all, a variation on what we ask about ethical true-crime production and consumption around here all the time: “Is true crime media influencing our real justice system?”
It for sure is, and Big True Crime is an efficient and tart look at the ways that can happen, whether it’s misapprehension of the definition of “reasonable doubt” by civilians, the spread of junk forensics (forensic odontology is memorably dismissed by the Innocence Project’s M. Chris Fabricant as “a lot like looking at a cloud”), and the process by which real lives and grieving become IP and infotainment. Talking-head interviewees include Weinman, Fabricant, Amanda Knox, Kim Goldman, and Nick Quah, and the POV is definitely that the true-crime industrial complex is a net negative in the culture.
I don’t entirely disagree, as you know. BTC economically covers a ton of ground, and if it gets any viewers to re-examine 1) what they get out of true-crime properties and programming, and 2) how shows like COPS, but also “prestige” material like The Staircase, frame and flatten real pain into monetizable narrative, it’s worth the time. I respect that it’s taking a position and not both-sidesing its takes on “true-crime brain,” or the cynically cutesy marketing of/at “crime cons” — but it’s just as worthwhile, IMO, for the sequences that made me want to push back, because I had to think about why I’d paused BTC to hone my reaction in my notes.
The first instance is pretty straightforward: Fabricant was bemoaning the pernicious influence of Forensic Files and its ilk. He’s not wrong, but at the same time, I just don’t enjoy anyone coming for my man Peter Thomas, even indirectly.
The second came when BTC began unpacking Serial and its perceived influence on the true-crime narrative space — and on the disposition of Adnan Syed’s case. Via Quah and others, BTC makes the point that Serial and This American Life blur the line between storytelling and journalism vis-a-vis their MOs, and Rabia Chaudry notes of Undisclosed that “we’ll never be as good at narrative as Serial was — but at the end of the day, the facts are what matter.” Welllll, yes and no, but I’m not going to claim disingenuously that I don’t see Chaudry’s point here. But then she added, “The whole purpose of the reporting is to exonerate this person. Period.” That “the” is doing a lot, no?
The whole purpose of Chaudry’s reporting, and the whole purpose for her of urging Sarah Koenig and the Serial team to do their reporting, was to exonerate Adnan Syed. At the same time, the purpose of any un-definite-articled reporting is: reporting. Reporters report, documentaries document, etc. and so on — and I don’t know that “reporting” whose stated purpose is an activist/exoneration outcome “reporting,” then. “Investigating,” “interrogating,” or “fact-finding” might work better; broadening our definition (or expectations) of “reporting” might work better…don’t misunderstand me, I have no kick with questioning the integrity of Serial’s “journalism,” which is maybe best classified as neo-crimoir narrative non-fiction instead. And whatever we call it, we oughtn’t to give it sole or even significant credit for getting Syed out of prison.
With all of that said, “at the end of the day” in reporting, “the facts” that “matter” can’t only be the ones that “exonerate this person.” Chaudry knows this, and also has never pretended she was an objective recorder, and I respect that, actually; the idea isn’t to nitpick her specific comments. My issue is that BTC, perhaps accidentally, ends up creating a false binary in that section of the doc: Serial/positioning audio storytelling as investigative journalism = bad; Undisclosed/perhaps more clumsily constructed stories with more transparent motives = good. Here again, while I agree up to a point, it isn’t that simple, and it also isn’t all that helpful if we really want to grapple with the ethics of true crime as “infotainment,” and whether any approach or rationale absolves makers or consumers of complicity.
I spent quite a bit of time parsing this for myself, trying to clarify my reaction! That’s what you want documentaries to do sometimes — put a splinter in your paw and make you work it free! Thanks, Canada!
The third thing was the feeling that all “prestige content” in the space — set off with air quotes by Knox — was getting co-indicted on the same charges of creating an unexamined craze in various streaming C-suites. And, you know, BTC is under an hour, so not every nuance is going to get equal time, I get it, but the issues with Making a Murderer are not the same as the issues with Dahmer are not the same as the issues with OJ: Made In America. I absolutely understand why Knox wants to continue drawing attention to the idea that becoming an involuntary public figure shouldn’t then put your life in the public domain; at the same time, making the point that her life isn’t our business is…now…her literal business.
Like I said: nobody’s wrong here! I love it when a documentary I’m just planning to let wash over me ends up spawning four pages of notes! It’s well made, it’s thought-provoking, and I’m stealing Quah’s “democratization without discernment” line starting today. You can watch Big True Crime yourselves for free on YouTube
and if you do, I hope you’ll tell me what you think. — SDB
I had forgotten Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy had Capote/Vidal-style beef. (And I think Capote maybe had beef with one of the ladies too? …I just went down the hall and looked it up, and sure enough, he called Hellman “George Washington in drag.” Good grief.) McCarthy, who evidently made intemperate remarks on Dick Cavett’s show early in 1980 — like, of course that’s where it was; if it was the twentieth century and you were a half-drunk author trying to get into it with a rival, it was happening in Cavett’s presence — got sued by Hellman for libel to the tune of $2.5 million. From a contemporary NYT article noting that McCarthy’s attempt to have the case dismissed had failed:
During the course of the interview, which was televised on Jan. 24 and 25, 1980, Miss McCarthy was asked about writers she considered overrated. She told Mr. Cavett she thought Miss Hellman was ''tremendously overrated, a bad writer, and dishonest writer.''
Mr. Cavett asked: ''What is dishonest about her?''
Miss McCarthy replied: ''Everything. But I said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' ''
The basis for the decision that the case could proceed: the judge’s weirdly deeming Hellman “not a public figure” — Hellman, the widow of Dashiell Hammett, had already been portrayed by Jane Fonda in the movie Julia and photographed in a Blackglama mink ad, but: okay — although the article’s explanation of the parameters of libel law is instructive, given how many of these suits seem to get filed of late:
According to Judge Baer, in addition to being a person of ''general notoriety,'' a public figure must be someone who is involved in a ''public issue, question or controversy.'' Libel cases are difficult to prove if a public figure is involved because malice must be shown. The law defines malice as making false remarks in reckless disregard of the truth.
A 2015 play, which starred the venerable Cavett (who also got sued in the action) as himself, revisited the contretemps:
The play uses transcripts from Cavett’s show as well as invented scenes surrounding the event, such as an on-air confrontation between the two that never happened. An acquaintance of Cavett’s, Hellman sent him a note saying that though they had been cordial in the past, she would exact her revenge. “It was either ‘why the hell’ or ‘why the f–k’ didn’t you defend me,” he says with a laugh, about Hellman calling him out. His response was “I hardly think of you as anyone who needs defending.”
And if you didn’t make it out to the theater for that one, a 2011 book by Alan Ackerman should more than cover the subject. Franklin Foer’s review of the book is a New Yorker-esque deep dive into what each author got out of the battle, and which aspects of each of their biographies might have brought them to the battlefield to begin with…not to mention the many, and not inconsequential, lies Hellman had told and profited from, well before McCarthy called her out on Cavett.
She was a spectacular liar. Her biographers have thoroughly documented her mendacity; her closest friends testified to it. Memoir, to state the obvious, is not an ideal genre for a writer with this particular pathology.
Granted, the story is more “petty civil action” than “true crime,” but I found it striking because, well, once again Cavett is at the center of it, and also because I wonder how each of these writers would have translated to the current true-crime cultural landscape. I think McCarthy is a Didion or a Jennifer Senior, and Hellman is…the Grey’s Anatomy grifter. — SDB
Tomorrow on Best Evidence: An eggs-traordinary heist (not sorry!), and your weekend true-crime to-do lists.
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