The Woman Across The Street etc etc
Plus: NY politics and MMA conspiracy theories
the true crime that's worth your time
Don’t be tricked by marketing for The Woman Across The Street From The Girl In The Window. Pure fiction isn’t our game here, as you know. We deviated from that slightly with our coverage of Only Murders in the Building, as that was a show that approached its mystery from such a specifically meta/how-the-true-crime-sausage-is-made angle that it made sense for us and our audience.
But with the weekend nigh, I wanted to make this public service announcement: TWATSFTHITW isn’t even true-crime-adjacent, and it’s also not very good.
Yes, the Kristen Bell series has been pitched to you as true crime, and/or characterized that way by reviewers who lump anything with a slaying in it under one big umbrella, as the Barney character in How I Met Your Mother far more offensively did regarding food. Remind me why that show’s brand deserves contemporary play, again? On second thought, don’t.
Apologies for the unnecessary meander; I have clearly spent too much time the last few days with episodic comedies, which, in addition to a “true crime” show (that’s not me, that’s the Netflix recommendation engine), TWATSFTHITW is presented as. But it’s not true crime at all, and it’s not comedy because comedy contains humor. It’s an unsatisfying, neither-fish-nor-fowl set of eight 22-minute episodes that would be great — truly, ideal — to watch if you have a bad cold and need to turn something just engaging enough on to fall in and out of sleep to. There you go, that’s my pull quote for the poster.
Here’s the deal: Kristen Bell is a woman alone in a Desperate Housewives-looking neighborhood; her husband has left her and her daughter is dead. The circumstances of the child’s death are deeply problematic — like so much of the show, it’s not presented broadly enough to elicit a shocked laugh that turns into a real one (think the films of Mel Brooks, or the Wayans brothers’ satirical body of work, or David Zucker’s stuff) so it just feels…gross. That same “not funny enough to push past offensive to hilarious” vibe infuses the rest of the show’s crimes, from two imagined intimate-partner homicides to at least very real one to a honestly confounding fight scene.
And unlike Brooks, the Wayans brothers, or Zucker, the series doesn’t pull from enough sources to qualify as a solid work of satire. Most of its notes are from the also-Netflix The Woman in the Window, right down to the ending. (Well, not the veeeery ending, which provided my only moment of real engagement. Too late, show, too late!)
The idea of sending up these types of psychological horror dramas or “Lifetime shows” isn’t a bad one (it’s also not true crime, I’ll again remind the multitudes of reviews of the show gumming up my Google alerts), it’s just one that isn’t done well here. It’s like the show — and maybe even Netflix — wants it both ways: it wants the juice/traffic/clicks you get from thriller content, but you also want to be too cool to take that stuff seriously. Given how gendered that genre is — think about it: the main character is always a woman, often struggling to be believed — it’s hard not to see the winkiness Netflix uses to present the series as a 2022 way to be all “When ladies aren’t shopping, they’re watching murder shows, yee haw!”
In the end TWATSFTHITW would have worked far better as an SNL digital short or an interspersed-throughout-the-episode runner on a show like Portlandia or Key and Peele. In fact, if you had just handed the Netflix script to Jordan Peele and given him a couple hours to make some edits and cuts, we might have ended up with something worth discussing.
But instead, we have a hollow show, no mystery or twists that you’ll even remotely invest in, and comedic elements that might raise a brow but that’s it. Save this for your reaction day off after the fourth booster (y’all, you know that’s coming) or when you’re laid up after surgery. But don’t turn it on and assume it has an even tangential relationship to an actual crime story, because there’s not even a whisper of genre in this strange, almost category-neutral show. — EB
The first half of Marilyn Manson alleged-abuse doc Phoenix Rising just screened at Sundance. The two-part film is an HBO production — an air date hasn’t been set yet, but it’s expected some time this year. It’s from true-crime vet Amy Berg and focuses heavily on the evidence supplied by Evan Rachel Wood, the actor who has publicly accused Brian Warner (that’s his real name) of abuse over the course of their years-long relationship, which began when Wood was in her teens and Warner in his 30s.
The full name of the first half of the doc is Phoenix Rising – Part One: Don’t Fall, which isn’t an ideal title, but I’m sure they’ll work that out. Per a review in The Hollywood Reporter:
Wood excoriates Warner directly here, recounting how physically, sexually and psychologically abusive he had been, cruelty which included drugging her and then raping her while they filmed the music video for his song “Heart-Shaped Glasses.” Only the first portion of this two-part HBO series was made available and shown via the Sundance Film Festival as this review went to press, but it’s pretty hard to see how Manson’s already shredded reputation will recover from it, no matter how much he denies, as reported here, that any of the allegations are true. Woods alludes to the fact that several other women, such as the actor Esme Bianco, have alleged that they suffered similar abuse from him and perhaps some of them will speak about it on camera in part two of Rising Phoenix.
Wood and Berg’s ultimate goal, however, seems to have less to do with exposing Warner for exposure’s sake than helping others recognize warning signs in their own troubled relationships — and influencing lawmakers. Berg has previous form here, having made scandal-exposing features such as An Open Secret, about the abuse of teens within the film industry, and Prophet’s Prey, which examined abuse within a fundamentalist sect of the Mormon church.
Berg also did an interview with THR where she detailed the extensive security necessary for the set, necessary because “There’s a lot of like online stalking in that world, the Brian Warner world, so we had to take a look at that.” The real headline here is that there are still Marilyn Manson fans out there, something I say with a tone of shocked disbelief not because I just can’t believe people support someone with credible allegations of abuse against him — hi, I live in the world! — but because he seems about as relevant in the 2020s as the Spin Doctors or Vengaboys.
(OK, now I feel bad. “Two Princes” still slaps a bit, and “We Like To Party” was in those Six Flags ads with the dancing old guy. So, apologies to Spin Doctors and Vengaboys, I guess.)
Per Berg:
I can say that I started receiving horror films in my Amazon account that I wasn’t ordering, and so I had to up the security with that. One of the things that we heard about while we were making this film was that people would just receive mysterious packages at their houses that they didn’t order, so I still don’t know if that was him or anything, but I had to do double security. I definitely was not ordering like 10 horror films between midnight and 6 a.m.
As suspected by the THR reviewer, in the second part of the doc the filmmakers “interview a number of survivors,” Berg says. “And it is faster-paced; it’s a lot of action. We’re really following the developments of the case and The Phoenix Act,” Berg said, referring to the domestic violence bill Wood worked to move forward.
There’s an ongoing LA County police investigation into allegations against Warner, all of which he’s denied, saying that interactions he’s had with women including Wood have been fully consensual. — EB
Did you ever hear the theory that Sheldon Silver was brought to justice by MMA fans? This is something a fed I was talking to for something unrelated I was working on floated to me a few years ago, and as I read Silver’s obituary after his death last month, the whole conversation came rushing back to me, memories of being in a packed dive bar (oh, I swoon) and all.
Silver was a longtime, fully-entrenched New York politician, speaker of the New York State Assembly from 1994 to 2015 and a Manhattan native. A Democrat, he flip-flopped on the death penalty, supported rent control, and opposed congestion tolls and commuter taxes. He also hated the sport of mixed martial arts, and long after the pro-level version of the discipline had been legalized in every other state, it remained against the law in New York.
That all changed as soon as he left politics, which he did with a bang in 2015 just two weeks after he was elected to his 11th term in office, when he was arrested on felony corruption charges. At the time, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said, “For many years, New Yorkers have asked the question — how could Speaker Silver, one of the most powerful men in all of New York, earn millions of dollars in outside income without deeply compromising his ability to honestly serve his constituents? Today, we provide the answer: He didn’t.”
It wasn’t too long after that that the ban on MMA and the UFC (its highest profile professional league) ended. I think it was the visual of the ban, scrolling on a TV above the bar, that prompted my fed friend to say “you can’t tell me Silver was the only corrupt guy in that class of NY politics. But he’s the only one that could keep out the UFC. Think about it. People had a reason to roll,” given how lucrative MMA had the potential to be in New York.
Bar chatter, to be sure, and there are plenty of holes to poke in that theory. I’m not trying to Pizzagate y’all, nor is anyone (well, not anyone here) suggesting Silver was framed. The evidence is clear, in my opinion. But I do think that it’s always interesting to see who gets prosecuted when these corruption cases go down, and who skates. With the MMA angle to this one — hint hint, true-crime producers reading this — the Silver story is well worth a look and investigation.
Silver ended up facing a slew of bribery and kickback charges, and was sentenced in 2018 after some fits and starts by the prosecution. He was released on furlough in 2021, with a plan to convert his sentence to home confinement.
That decision enraged folks like combat columnist Kevin Iole, who wrote at the time that Silver “basically looked down his nose at MMA fans and didn’t care that he was harming an entire industry.” Iole also quotes Dana White, the not-so-great-about-COVID, longtime Trump supporter who heads up the UFC, as saying, “The fact that a very bad, corrupt guy like this doesn’t have to serve his prison term is disgusting.”
A few days later, the furlough was revoked, and Silver, now 77, was ordered back to prison. He died in a hospital near the prison a little more than a week ago. As of publication time, the UFC does not have any New York events on its 2022 schedule, instead sticking to places like Houston and Las Vegas, where pandemic-era restrictions on public gatherings are basically non-existent. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Sarah’s on The Tindler Swindler for paid subscribers on Monday, while I’m on The Trojan Horse Affair for (probably) Tuesday. Wish us luck, and make sure to fully subscribe to get all the goods.
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