The Hunt For The Chameleon Killer takes too long
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
The 1990 murder and dismemberment of bank employee Beverly McGowan – by, police suspected, her roommate of recent vintage, "Alice" – and the subsequent credit-card and identity theft from McGowan's estate, as well as other various marks.
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The story, which may contain spoilers; to avoid them, jump to the last graf
I know everyone's sick of the "should have been a two-hour feature" crit about docuseries. Nobody's sicker of it than I am! I feel like I say it on a weekly damn basis about pointlessly serialized narratives, and not just true-crime ones, either.
But I'm sick of it because it's usually accurate, and literally never more so than about The Hunt For The Chameleon Killer, the genre equivalent of changing the font on that Keats paper to Courier to hit the page minimum. The three-parter, which hit the AMC/Sundance universe late last week – I think it's airing Thursday nights; I also think you shouldn't bother to look it up – starts with the murder of McGowan*, and embarks on the search for the woman suspected of killing her, Elaine Parent, a search that wound through a dozen years, and at least as many identities and ID frauds.
UM host Robert Stack, in the 1991 segment that featured McGowan's then-unsolved murder. You should probably track that down instead. (Sundance)
The case itself is a solid starting point – a grisly mystery, costume changes, short-con tradecraft in the pre-internet age – but once you know the unsatisfying way in which it ended nearly a quarter of a century ago, you won't really see any point in continuing with Chameleon. That's particularly true if, like me, you looked up the details of the case during Chameleon because you thought the original Unsolved Mysteries segment from 1991 Chameleon recycles interview footage from would surely be a more efficient use of your research time. And no doubt it is, because the thing is just unconscionably slow.
It's not bad, or at least it has the potential for a B or B-minus: the story itself, as I said, as well as a director, Adam Luria, with enough pertinent credits (Secrets of the Dead; a Yorkshire Ripper project) to suggest he's capable of far better than this torpid "network news-mag at 0.75x" build. Although maybe that's why Luria got tapped for Chameleon; it's not his fault that it's not in the right "container," but because this is what the network wanted, they chose a guy who could stall in the expected fashion.
Hope you like this map, 'cause if you watch Chameleon, you'll be seeing it allll the times. (Sundance)
And boy howdy is there a lot of stalling. It's not only the same handful of snapshots of McGowan that get repeated over and over; it's already-superfluous maps, B-roll of McGowan's Lauderdale condo, and a recent and unwelcome arrival to The Big Book Of True-Crime Visual Clichés, the date-stamp chyron that ominously flips back in time. If Chameleon is a feature that isn't hemming and hawing until it gets to a so-called cliffhanger, it's probably not bothering with dozens of re-enactments in which "Alice" is putting in an earring, applying mascara, or dialing a telephone with a figuratively ominous red Lee Press-On.
Everything about it takes too long, even talking-heads with knowledgeable analysts and journos. (In one case, the journo himself is spreading so much mustard on every "revelation" that he's compounding the problem. We've seen true-crime shows before, Tim Tate; spit it out!) Local crime reporter Donna Pazdera might have compelling intel about the relationship between the press and law enforcement at the time, but it's not really followed up. Forensic psych Barbara Kirwin is charismatic, but oversubscribes the popularity with murderers of "taunting" the police. And the fact is that this story ended, somewhat un-definitively, in 2002 – and here in the internet age, closed-ended docuseries don't have the luxury of pacing this bovine. - SDB