Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders fails to grasp what makes the true-crime genre compelling

The Atlantic

Dick Wolf's latest Law & Order is “murder-reenactment-by-the-numbers, complete with black-and-white flashbacks, an oppressively ominous and omnipresent score, and a script that continually feels the need to point out the patently obvious,” says Sophie Gilbert. It doesn’t explore the crimes the way such shows as Serial and American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson did. “For the most part,” she writes, “Lyle and Erik’s crime seems like a fait accompli, something that happened in history and is now playing out again for viewers’ entertainment. That we might want to know more about what went wrong—and why crimes like this leave such a permanent mark on the national curiosity—apparently just isn’t part of the Law & Order formula.”

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