Netflix's The Innocent Man is a missed opportunity to tell a more comprehensive story

The Atlantic

The six-part true-crime docuseries based on the John Grisham's nonfiction book about two wrongful conviction murders in small-town Ada, Oklahoma has all the usual true-crime docuseries tropes, yet there's something missing. "The Innocent Man lays out neat timelines, stacks of evidence, an admirable number of in-person interviews, and a compelling argument that police and prosecutors in Ada unlawfully collaborated in getting four men convicted of murder," says Sophie Gilbert. "What it doesn’t explain is why the show’s events came to pass. The superlative true-crime series of the past few years don’t just re-litigate old cases and (very occasionally) produce definitive answers; they investigate the cultural and societal factors at play. Both Ezra Edelman’s Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America and Ryan Murphy’s The People v. O. J. Simpson used the same obsessively covered crime to reveal sharp insights about race, celebrity, and tabloid culture. Netflix’s own The Keepers framed itself around a murder, but ended up telling a more thoughtful and valuable story about trauma, recovery, and fighting for justice. Throughout all six episodes of The Innocent Man, elements studded into the story beg to be examined more closely. Not the nitty-gritty facts of the two crimes, which are exhaustively unpacked, but the circumstances that contributed to them."

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