Making A Murderer [Netflix - Documentary Series]

In nearly every interview they've given since the launch of their Netflix true crime sensation Making a Murderer, directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi have struck the same note.

They didn't go into the project seeking to exonerate Steven Avery, they say. They have no opinion as to whether or not he killed Teresa Halbach, they say. Their aim is to highlight problems with the US legal system that should give pause even to those who come away from the 10-part documentary believing Avery really did commit the crime for which he is currently imprisoned, they say. The question is not one of guilt or innocence — it's one of prosecutor misconduct and horrible mistreatment of the accused, they say.

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The effect that binge-watching can have on viewers' response to a TV show is something I first noticed back during the second season of Showtime's Homeland. When it aired, the season was roundly derided for its ludicrous plot twists and bizarre emotional logic, with viewers laughing over, say, a pacemaker being hacked via the internet. What had happened to the sinuous espionage series of season one?

Yet I found that viewers who watched Homeland's second season on DVD or on demand had an almost uniformly different experience. In that format, the weird, gonzo plot twists that caused so many weekly viewers to throw up their hands in frustration were reduced from a series of jarring potholes to a bunch of minor bumps in the road.

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Binge-watching, simply put, wears down our critical faculties. It tends to reduce a series to its most obvious elements, setting aside the considerations of theme or meaning in favor of the most surface-level plot and character stuff. It, in other words, flattens a show.

This is not to say you can't perform a critical assessment after a binge-watch — if it did, it would mean I was lying every time I reviewed a TV show after bingeing it. But it does mean that the binge can cause the onset of a sort of vegetative state, where the next episode is always there to welcome you after the previous one ends, and it's all the easier to just keep going.

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As I argued in 2015, Netflix itself is inventing a new sort of art form, where the length of the story being told is novel, yes, but so is the way in which it's assumed you'll consume it — all at once, in a big pile. This reduces each episode to just another unit, mostly there to mark a natural stopping point rather than anything else. And, indeed, as Netflix's Ted Sarandos told me when I interviewed him for that piece, the streaming service increasingly thinks of its seasons as big, long episodes, a marked change from how TV has traditionally been produced.

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All of this brings us back to Making a Murderer, which wanted to be about one thing but ended up, in the minds of its many fans (as well as many members of the media), mostly being about whether Avery deserves to be in prison.

The numerous other themes that Demos and Ricciardi have talked about — the criticism of media coverage of Avery's case and trial, the examination of prosecution tactics to influence juries, the deep dive into small-town prejudices, the consideration of class in the American judicial system — are all present in the documentary. But they're much easier to miss (or ignore) when you watch all 10 episodes in a weekend (or less).

If Making a Murderer had been released on a weekly basis, with the discussion proceeding more slowly than it did under the Netflix model, it would have been easier to tease out all these things in the conversations that sprung up around the show. When consumed all at once over the holiday break, it necessarily became all about Avery and whether he committed the crime.