The wild times and beastly behavior of Bronx Zoo '90
the true crime that's worth your time
[read the full Bronx Zoo ‘90 review here, or upgrade to get all content ad-free in your inbox!]
The crimes
[inhales deeply] Harassment; extortion; possession of drugs of abuse; possession of illegal exotic wildlife within city limits; statutory rape; felony DUI.
And that's not even counting multiple counts of misdemeanor '80s hair, or a survivor's claim that Donald Trump, of all people, is one of a very few to reach out to her about leaving her "relationship" with a New York Yankee twice her age, in…
The story
…Bronx Zoo '90: Crime, Chaos and Baseball, Peacock's three-part look at the miserable miscreants of the 1990 New York Yankees. I could make a joke here about adding "violation of the SEO-thirsty-subtitle statute" to the list above, but Bronx Zoo '90 is jam-packed with plenty of all three – and very watchable for most of its runtime. But is it too overstuffed? And will viewers who didn't grow up in the tri-state area, and/or don't care about MLB, want to make time for it?
I did grow up in the NYC suburbs and care deeply about baseball, so I had really looked forward to Bronx Zoo '90, mostly because the 1990 season spanned my senior year in high school and freshman semester in college, so even the team I did follow faded far into the background behind the prom and tailgating and blah blah. But I remembered the names and most of the headlines, and certainly I remembered then-owner George Steinbrenner's glorious ouster from day-to-day operations of the Yankees.
Bronx Zoo '90 rolls out choice selections from the glory days of Gotham-tabloid backpage headlines – whoever got to title stories about Kevin Maas, a rookie who looked like a soap star and a rare bright spot that year, lived their best life for months – and director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) clearly 1) knows/cares a lot about the subject, and 2) understands how irresistible it is. Possibly the most storied, self-serious franchise in sports, reduced to tawdry Thanksgiving-druncle squabbling in public? Hard to go wrong there.
The series also has fantastic access as far as the talking-head interviews: coaches and players (Buck Showalter; Don Mattingly); beat writers and play-by-play vets (Joel Sherman; Suzyn Waldman; Michael Kay); NYC mainstays like Rosanna Scotto and Len Berman. Even the pair at the center of the most serious criminal story in BZ90 – Mel Hall, currently serving a 40-odd-year sentence for assaulting a 12-year-old; and his 1990 target, Chaz Easterly, now a victim advocate – both participate.
But BZ90 suffers from what I might call a lack of editorial discipline, one that's particularly frustrating when it comes to Hall and Easterly. There is some attempt by some interviewees to put that "relationship" in context, to convey how fucking wild it is that Hall set his sights on Easterly – then 15 years old – and then started grooming her entire family, and moved in with them, and went to Easterly's prom, and put the prom picture in the Yankees yearbook. But a lot of the commentary about that situation is either about how much of an antisocial choad Hall was in every other aspect of his life (he's the guy who brought cougars into the clubhouse; he also bullied Bernie Williams, one of the gentlest men to play the sport), or that 1990 was a different time.
Well, that's a convenient take, given that not one of the dozens of people asked about Hall and Easterly did much about it at the time except roll their eyes. And hey, when I was 15, I had a friend whose "boyfriend" was 30, and married, and we all thought that was glamorous and grown-up versus what it actually was, so I don't need folks to flagellate themselves on-camera about not stepping in while it was going on. It's more that the docuseries doesn't push back on the idea that preying on a teenager is merely "scandalous" or "sordid." It's a felony, for a reason, and if it's a central plank in your topical "the 1990 season was a scuzzy nightmare" platform, I think you have to engage more thoroughly with how badly everyone let Easterly down.
That's not the only aspect of the story BZ90 is perhaps reluctant to engage with. It gets pretty granular about Steinbrenner's obsessive quest to ruin star outfielder Dave Winfield, but exactly zero is said about the role of race and racism, there or anywhere else. I can understand Caruso not wanting to whack that hornet's nest (or maybe he did, and the hornets declined to emerge), but I found myself wishing for a version of this story with a brighter spotlight on this and other battles between Yankee ownership and "outspoken" Black superstars. (Not to mention the multi-part series someone could get from putting coverage of Pascual Pérez's "struggles" alongside coverage of Steve Howe's.)
Again, if Caruso felt like he couldn't get his arms around the issue, that's fine, but BZ90 isn't especially conscientious about confining itself to the 1990 season. In some ways, that's good and entertaining: the rewind to Steinbrenner buying the team in 1973; the analysis of Billy Martin's 1989 death in a car crash as touching off a downward organizational spiral. In other ways, like the last half of the last ep that sees the series rushing headlong towards the late-'90s championship dynasty, it feels a lot like execs insisted on a feel-better last act, to the smoldering heap of 1990 to the "phoenix" of the dynasty teams later in the decade.
That's not on Caruso, and it's not fair to judge Bronx Zoo '90 on a docuseries it didn't set out to be. It sets out to be a yearbook of sorts of a terrible but thought-provoking season – and while it's over-produced in spots and…under-curious, I guess, in others, it's an entertaining sit, jam-packed with visuals of some of the most compelling characters of the late 20th century. As true crime, it could do better, but as a place-holder the next time your team's rained out, you could do worse.
The story
…Bronx Zoo '90: Crime, Chaos and Baseball, Peacock's three-part look at the miserable miscreants of the 1990 New York Yankees. I could make a joke here about adding "violation of the SEO-thirsty-subtitle statute" to the list above, but Bronx Zoo '90 is jam-packed with plenty of all three – and very watchable for most of its runtime. But is it too overstuffed? And will viewers who didn't grow up in the tri-state area, and/or don't care about MLB, want to make time for it?
I did grow up in the NYC suburbs and care deeply about baseball, so I had really looked forward to Bronx Zoo '90, mostly because the 1990 season spanned my senior year in high school and freshman semester in college, so even the team I did follow faded far into the background behind the prom and tailgating and blah blah. But I remembered the names and most of the headlines, and certainly I remembered then-owner George Steinbrenner's glorious ouster from day-to-day operations of the Yankees.
Bronx Zoo '90 rolls out choice selections from the glory days of Gotham-tabloid backpage headlines – whoever got to title stories about Kevin Maas, a rookie who looked like a soap star and a rare bright spot that year, lived their best life for months – and director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) clearly 1) knows/cares a lot about the subject, and 2) understands how irresistible it is. Possibly the most storied, self-serious franchise in sports, reduced to tawdry Thanksgiving-druncle squabbling in public? Hard to go wrong there.
The series also has fantastic access as far as the talking-head interviews: coaches and players (Buck Showalter; Don Mattingly); beat writers and play-by-play vets (Joel Sherman; Suzyn Waldman; Michael Kay); NYC mainstays like Rosanna Scotto and Len Berman. Even the pair at the center of the most serious criminal story in BZ90 – Mel Hall, currently serving a 40-odd-year sentence for assaulting a 12-year-old; and his 1990 target, Chaz Easterly, now a victim advocate – both participate.
But BZ90 suffers from what I might call a lack of editorial discipline, one that's particularly frustrating when it comes to Hall and Easterly. There is some attempt by some interviewees to put that "relationship" in context, to convey how fucking wild it is that Hall set his sights on Easterly – then 15 years old – and then started grooming her entire family, and moved in with them, and went to Easterly's prom, and put the prom picture in the Yankees yearbook. But a lot of the commentary about that situation is either about how much of an antisocial choad Hall was in every other aspect of his life (he's the guy who brought cougars into the clubhouse; he also bullied Bernie Williams, one of the gentlest men to play the sport), or that 1990 was a different time.
Well, that's a convenient take, given that not one of the dozens of people asked about Hall and Easterly did anything about it at the time except roll their eyes. And hey, when I was 15, I had a friend whose "boyfriend" was 30, and married, and we all thought that was glamorous and grown-up, so I don't need everyone to flagellate themselves on-camera about not stepping in while it was going on. It's more that the docuseries doesn't push back on the idea that preying on a teenager goes beyond "scandalous" or "sordid." It's a felony, for a reason, and if it's a central plank in your topical "the 1990 season was a scuzzy nightmare" platform, I think you have to engage more thoroughly with how badly everyone let Easterly down.
That's not the only aspect of the story BZ90 is perhaps reluctant to engage with. It gets pretty granular about Steinbrenner's obsessive quest to ruin star outfielder Dave Winfield, but exactly zero is said about the role of race and racism, there or anywhere else. I can understand Caruso not wanting to whack that hornet's nest (or maybe he did, and the hornets declined to emerge), but I found myself wishing a director of color would take on this same story and hang a brighter light on this and other battles between Yankee ownership and "outspoken" Black superstars. (Not to mention the multi-part series someone could get from putting coverage of Pascual Pérez's "struggles" alongside coverage of Steve Howe's.)
Again, if Caruso felt like he couldn't get his arms around that issue, that's fine, but BZ90 isn't especially conscientious about confining itself to the 1990 season. In some ways, that's good and entertaining: the rewind to Steinbrenner buying the team in 1973; the analysis of Billy Martin's death in a car crash as touching off a downward organizational spiral. In other ways, like the last half of the last ep that sees the series rushing headlong towards the late-'90s championship dynasty, it feels a lot like execs insisted on a feel-better last act, to the smoldering heap of 1990 to the "phoenix" of the dynasty teams later in the decade.
That's not on Caruso, and it's not fair to judge Bronx Zoo '90 on a docuseries it didn't set out to be. It sets out to be a yearbook of sorts of a terrible but thought-provoking season – and while it's over-produced in spots and…under-curious, I guess, in others, it's an entertaining sit, jam-packed with visuals of some of the most compelling characters of the late 20th century. As true crime, it could do better, but as a place-holder the next time your team's rained out, you could do worse.