The Hot Zone · House Beautiful · Houston's Biggest Monster
Plus Andrea Canning, an unjustly accused puma, and more
the true crime that's worth your time
I don’t wish to make light of the anthrax attacks that (re-)terrorized the country in the weeks following 9/11, but I do feel obliged to observe that naming a miniseries about those attacks “The Hot Zone” when the only reason I’m even considering watching it is the hotness of the two leads? Seems like a non-fatal but eminently avoidable self-own on the part of NatGeo.
I mean, you can try to hide Tony Goldwyn’s foxy light under the bushel of a Ned Flanders mustache and a plastic pocket protector, but it’s not going to work, sorry.
Then again, maybe it’s not the worst thing that my first thought upon seeing the promo tweet above went along the lines of “I’ve gotcher hot zone right here,” because NatGeo is going to have a handful of issues with marketing the property, IMO. For starters, while IMDb is listing this season of THZ as its own discrete show, and its episodes as “Season 1,” what most would consider the first season of The Hot Zone — starring Julianna Margulies, Robert Wisdom, and others — premiered in 2019, and that’s basically a decade ago in corona years, but either way, I don’t see the point of splitting them off from each other.
The second problem isn’t unrelated, to wit: the network should build on whatever faint goodwill or admiration the previous six episodes might have built up, because IIRC, THZ 1.0 was like a lot of other NatGeo product: handsomely shot, thoroughly researched, impressively cast, and regrettably static thanks to basic-cable restrictions and unimaginatively linear storytelling. NatGeo programming is like that, mostly; it’s…stolid. Smithsonian shows have a little flair, sometimes, thanks to unique access to archival materials, but NatGeo “events” are responsible and careful. For a story like this, I think you need a less sober-sided approach, particularly since it’s always seemed to me like the case’s conclusion and coda didn’t get nearly the front-page attention the actual attacks did, and NatGeo’s narrative “house style” isn’t going to interrogate that.
And finally…you know. It’s about a government employee who went rogue with a toxic bioweapon. Like I said, it’s a fascinating chapter, but a whodunnit about a lethal infection is maybe not the draw the executive suite thought it was in, say, February of 2020. If you’ve seen the 2011 Frontline on Ivins and the attacks, you’re probably all set. Anyone got a longread we should look at instead? — SDB
Speaking of November true-crime premieres that just kind of make us feel tired…well, I can’t really top this AV Club headline: “Whether you want it or not, Tiger King 2 is coming this November.” Sam Barsanti notes that the return of March 2020’s streaming sensation is slated for November 17, then aptly summarizes why everyone in the review space is like, “‘…great.’”:
Where were you in the spring of 2020? You were at home, most likely, but what were you doing at the time? Other than washing your groceries with bleach and paying exorbitant prices for cheap cloth masks off the internet? If we had to guess, we’d say you were probably watching Netflix’s Tiger King, the closest thing television has had to a universal cultural moment since… the moon landing? The end of M*A*S*H? Actually, the Game Of Thrones finale might be a better point of comparison, because pretty much as soon as Tiger King happened, people got extremely goddamn sick of hearing about it.
The TK2 announcement came as part of an upcoming-programming trailer from Netflix in which it calls itself “the home of true crime” in so many words. Bold move timing-wise, given the fatigue many of us feel when confronted with yet another bloated and drone-shot-infested six-parter…but on the other hand, a bunch of these projects come from executive producer Bart Layton, whom you are maybe extremely goddamn sick of hearing about from me around here but I don’t care, watch The Impostor and American Animals, Layton rocks. Anyway! Here’s that trailer:
Which of these (there’s a full listing in notes below the video) do you think is going to be the one everyone’s talking about in 2022? I’m the most psyched for Puppet Master but suspect that Bad Vegan will be the goer. — SDB
Dateline embarked on its 30th season the other night with a look at a Kentucky triple murder; to mark the occasion, Town&Country ran an interview with Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning about the true-crime genre’s continuing appeal, whether she’s friends with the other co-hosts, blah blah blah. Based on the opening graf, a laborious explainer about Dateline’s bright position in the genre firmament, I thought this was probably a skip for you guys and me, but Canning is quite charming and real about what makes Dateline compelling, the responsibility she and the show feel to remember that it isn’t just entertainment product, and how a Lifetime special on Bambi Bembenek got her into true crime as a kid. Here’s a snip:
I think people are interested in true crime in general because they love to see a mystery unfold from beginning to end. We all have the curiosity. So many families look perfect from the outside, but there’s so many secrets behind those walls. Like, what is your neighbor really doing? Because so many of these stories just seem like normal people, right? And everyone always says the same thing: “This does not happen around here.” It’s always the same story. No one’s ever like, “Oh yeah, we just had a murder down the street.”
I think people like to watch along and try to figure it out for themselves, as well. Like my husband will be like, “She did it,” and then five minutes later he’s like, “No, he did it,” and “I think I know why they did it.”
Not the most penetrating insights here, but 1) it’s a little unusual to see someone who works in the genre gently clocking it for the nosiness it caters to, as well as one of its tropes; and 2) how funny that even a correspondent’s spouse is gaming the ending based on, like, whether an interviewee is framed so you can’t see their prison scrubs, which is what we civilians do here in BE East Coast HQ living room. — SDB
We also watch a lot of documentaries to find the ones you should bother with, and renting those/subscribing to their streaming-service homes costs money. If you could support our work with a paid subscription, both HQs would really appreciate it — and so would our contributors, whom we would love to give a raise one of these days, because they’re great.
Plus you’ll get extra reviews, and access to the entire archive. Want to know if that Pharma Bro doc is actually a Pharma No? Paid subscribers will find out this week. — SDB
House Beautiful is getting into the podcast game with Dark House. Premiering Wednesday, Dark House sounds primarily like an October launch/haunted house play, but it’s not like there’s no overlap between haunted properties and historic true crime…and it’s only five episodes, at least as of this writing. Variety breaks it down:
In the five-part limited series, House Beautiful editors and co-hosts Alyssa Fiorentino and Hadley Mendelsohn combine true crime, ghost stories, interior design, spirituality and history, exploring Villisca Axe Murder House in Villisca, Iowa; L.A.’s Jean Harlow House; the Mercer-Williams Museum in Savannah, Ga.; and the S.K. Pierce Mansion in Gardner, Mass.
I’m intrigued; House Beautiful’s logline wouldn’t seem to suggest a foray into this particular subject matter. What area rug to pair with a Sherwin Williams paint called “Burnt Sage,” or how to use a studfinder to make sure Bad Ronald isn’t in the walls of your new house, sure. …Okay, now I kind of want to hear that podcast, but I might check this one out as well. You can listen to the Dark House trailer right here. — SDB
Let’s wrap up with three reads from Texas Monthly to while away your lunch hour. The first is from the October 2021 issue, “Who Shot Walker Dougherty?”, and sees TM’s Wes Ferguson trying to untangle a hectic 2017 shoot-out that turned into a political football: “A shoot-out at a Big Bend ranch captured the nation’s attention: first as an alleged ambush by undocumented migrants, then as a fear-mongering hoax. The real story is much more mysterious.” Ferguson’s economical prose is careful not to lead the reader towards one conclusion or another, and I was struck as I often am reading Texas Monthly at how good these reporters always are at taking me to a place I would probably never find myself (a remote hunting lodge), and introducing me without judgment to people I would probably never meet IRL (people who own AR-15s). A snippet of Ferguson’s systematic description of the gun battle:
The bullet didn’t stop until it reached the bottom of his left lung, where it lodged not far from his heart.
Walker took a breath, and blood spurted from the wound. Walker had seen plenty of lung-shot animals during his career, and they didn’t last very long. Assessing his wound, he thought, That’s not going to work.
Next up is another disputed death, this one a report from Morgan O’Hanlon on the death of Christopher Whiteley, which initially got blamed on a mountain lion, but that theory found detractors almost immediately. I did not predict complimenting a magazine piece for its process-y intel on the order and nature of big-cat kills here in 2021, but here we all are. In this snippet from “If a Mountain Lion Didn’t Kill Christopher Whiteley, What or Who Did?”, authorities’ explanation for why they suspected a mountain lion in Whiteley’s death brought to mind John Douglas’s explanation for why human communities invented supernatural killers like vampires and werewolves — because it defied comprehension that a human, someone they knew from their village, could have visited certain monstrous types of damage on another human.
[D]eputies began to suspect that a mountain lion was to blame almost immediately after the body was found. “There was nothing that was consistent with what a human would have done or should have done or could have done,” Deeds said. “Everything pointed to a large animal, like a cat.”
Finally, a flashback to the great Skip Hollandsworth’s 2011 piece, “The Lost Boys,” on Dean Corll and the havoc his predations continued to wreak on Houston decades after he was apprehended. I can’t recall how we got on the subject, but I had a conversation in the Exhibit B. Insta comments about Corll, and the fact that this case and Corll’s victim “count” were massive, and yet compared with Ted Bundy’s crimes, Corll isn’t nearly as extensively covered.
Within a week, the remains of 27 young males had been found, a couple of them as young as thirteen, one as old as twenty. The New York Times quickly labeled the killings “the largest multiple murder case in United States history”—the phrase “serial killer” had not yet been coined—surpassing the 13 women choked to death by the Boston Strangler in the early sixties, the 16 people shot by Charles Whitman in 1966 from the Tower at the University of Texas, and the 25 itinerant workers killed by Juan Corona in California just two years earlier. Soon reporters began flying to Houston from every corner of the United States. A few arrived from as far away as Japan and Pakistan. Even Truman Capote, hoping to revive his floundering career and produce his next In Cold Blood, showed up, wearing his signature Panama hat, smoking cigarettes, and being trailed by an entourage of assistants.
I don’t know why the article is trending right now, ten and a half years later, but you can’t go wrong with a Hollandsworth, I know that. — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: Waiting on the R Kelly jury, unlicensed autopsies, Bill Gates, Dominick Dunne, and much more.
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