HBO's McMillions is an amusing take on the true-crime docuseries genre

TVLine

"McMillions is technically a true crime documentary, though it doesn’t feel like what we’ve become accustomed to," says Pilot Viruet of the six-part docuseries that premiered Monday on the McDonald’s Monopoly game scam. "Gritty, depressing true crime docs litter television — just take a cursory glance at Netflix! — and tend to focus on the more disturbing crimes, uncomfortably (and exploitatively) delighting in getting into the heads of murderers. McMillions, then, sometimes feels like an anomaly: it frequently takes a light-hearted approach, complete with music that could score an Ocean’s Eleven heist scene, silly reenactments (such as one dramatizing an agent reading a Post-It note), and Doug Mathews, a colorful special agent who comes off less of a member of the FBI and more like an over-excitable puppy eager to play with the big dogs."

ALSO:

• McMillions fits neatly into a mini-genre of documentary: the true-crime-adjacent story that derives its power more from the craziness of its subject matter than from control of tone or artistic skill, such as the Fyre documentaries and Three Identical strangers
• McMillions has an immediate advantage in that the real people involved in the story are larger-than-life characters
• There are so many twists and turns along the way, it becomes difficult to believe any of this is true