Worst Ex Ever illustrates how domestic violence flummoxes the legal system
the true crime that's worth your time
Netflix's Worst [Something] Ever franchise might be one of its best-kept true crime secrets. That's not to say that two-season series Worst Roommate Ever lacked viewership: while the streamer is notoriously tight-lipped about its engagement levels, that show's first and second seasons were listed in the top tens I saw, at least. It's provocatively packaged content, so that tracks. But underneath that provocation lurks a smart, sensitive, survivor-centered show about how truly fragile the social contract of co-habitation is. The hyperbolic nature of the all-caps worst-everism is — as Hannah Waddingham's The Fall Guy character might put it — just the sexy bacon around that less palatable truth.
With Worst Ex Ever, which drops on August 28, there's that same sexy bacon, but this time it's wrapped around an indictment of how our full top-to-bottom legal system grapples with partner violence and impending crime. Across its four episodes, we hear again and again about situations that went from red flag to violence with an abundance of official intervention along the way — but nothing was enough to prevent each narrative's painful climax. To be clear, that's not because the titular worst exes were some sort of unstoppable, near-supernatural force. It's because, the series elegantly shows instead of tells, we don't have a real safety net in place for people who are in danger from a former intimate partner.
The problem isn't just the police, though the now-expected skepticism about people who report abuse is certainly present in some of these cases. Prosecutions are dropped. Sentences are shortened. Probationary tracking drops the ball. It's a start-to-finish disaster, and in about four hours director Cynthia Childs makes the case against our current system as crime prevention tool.
The cops who participated in its interviews underscore that thesis, with many hemming and haw-ing when describing the events prior to each episode's most "central" crime (in two cases, that's a homicide, other cases involve sexual assault, imprisonment, and a truly wild legal frame job), then suddenly seem galvanized after a clear-cut crime is committed. "At last," they seem to be saying, "we have something we know how to deal with."
That's not to say that Childs suggests a solution. The seasoned true crime director/producer — who also led the second Worst Roommate season, A&E's BTK: Confession of a Serial Killer, and a number of other solid properties — seems to know better than that. And if she had proposed a way forward, the series wouldn't work as well as it does. Focusing on telling four separate (and diverse) stories well, with a heavy reliance on the words of survivors and their family and friends, does the trick far better than an overt "what we have is BROKEN" cry of alarm ever would.
There's a final, unique element to this series that I want to point out, because I think it's especially smart and ethical. As opposed to relying on reenactments or those true-crime-standard b-roll shots of a shadowy figure or whatever, the Worst Ever series uses animated sequences to depict incidents that are being recounted. This works well for a number of reasons, mainly because the focus remains on the witness or survivor's words, as we're not at risk of being distracted by a re-enactor's portrayal.
It also gives us just enough distance from what's often a horrible incident to fully take it in. These are bleak stories that are hard to stomach, but by choosing an animated depiction, you feel less compelled to look away. It's an added