Netflix's What Jennifer Did Proves True Crime Is in Its Flop Era

A title like What Jennifer Did poses a clear question: What did Jennifer Pan do?

On November 8, 2010, Pan, a 28-year-old woman from Markham, Ontario, called 911 claiming to be the victim of a home invasion. Both on the call and in her initial interview with police, Pan claimed three men broke into her family's home, tied her to a banister upstairs, and shot her parents, killing her mother, Bich Ha Pan, and severely injuring her father, Hann Pan.

The seemingly random attack rattled the community, but as the investigation unfolded, suspicion fell on Pan, who reluctantly revealed she'd been lying to her parents about her education — she falsely claimed she was pursuing a pharmacology degree at university — and her on-again, off-again romance with boyfriend Daniel Wong. In What Jennifer Did, detectives recall how they slowly teased the truth out of Pan and arrived at the conclusion that she was the mastermind behind a murder-for-hire plot that also implicated Wong and several associates, including Lenford Crawford and David Mylvaganam. All four were convicted on first-degree murder and attempted murder charges and sentenced to life in prison.

As the above 175-word description indicates, the Pan case, while tragic, is incredibly straightforward. Directed by Jenny Popplewell (American Murder: The Family Next Door), the Netflix documentary efficiently establishes Pan's fraught relationship with her parents, immigrants from the Chinese diaspora in Vietnam who put immense pressure on their daughter to pursue a career in the medical field. Their lofty expectations made Pan, an average but not exceptional student, feel like a failure, prompting her to lie about her education and falsify her records. As her resentment grew, she sought solace in Wong, who sold marijuana and worked at a pizzeria, but the relationship angered Hann, who believed Wong "wasn't going anywhere in life," Pan told detectives in her second interview.

With this context in mind, Pan's alleged motive becomes obvious almost immediately (though she has maintained her innocence), but the documentary slow-walks the revelation, waiting until the final 30 minutes to connect the dots. Pan and Wong broke up two years before the murders, but she continued to harbor feelings for him; though he began dating someone else, they remained friends, and she believed reconciliation was still a possibility. The only obstacle, then, became her parents. In text messages, Wong admitted to connecting Pan with someone named "Homeboy" (later revealed to be Crawford) and "lin[ing] it all up" for her. Phone records then led police to Mylvaganam and Eric Carty, who admitted to conspiring with the others to kill the Pans in exchange for $10,000.

Though the details of this particular case are fairly cut and dry, there's room for further investigation into the context surrounding the Pans' expectations for their daughter and their detrimental effect on her. News coverage at the time explored the connection between the crime and the experience of Asian immigrants in Canada: In Toronto Life, Karen K. Ho described Hann as "the classic tiger dad, and Bich his reluctant accomplice" and characterized the murder-for-hire plot as the end result of Pan's mental unraveling.

What Jennifer Did incorporates a similar line of thought as Pan's former friend Nam Nguyen speaks to the "hard style of parenting" among Asian immigrants — "If you're in an environment where you're expected to come out on top every single time, and you're failing to meet that expectation, I think that could lead to disastrous results," he says — but it's brief. Instead, Popplewell gives the detectives ample time to gloat about how they used "their police techniques to find out what Jennifer did," the directive given to them by Hann when he awoke from his coma.

They praise Bill Goetz's interrogation strategy during Pan's third interview, explaining that in Canada, "police are allowed to lie" to suspects "so long as [they're] not bringing the administration of justice into disrepute." (After hours of interrogation, Pan claimed the crime was a botched suicide-for-hire scheme, which she orchestrated because she "didn't wanna be here anymore.") Regardless of whether Pan is guilty, it's odd to boast so proudly about manipulating someone into confessing, particularly given the prevalence and devastating impact of false confessions.

The film's lone surprising moment comes just before the end credits, when a title card reveals that the accused, including Pan, won their appeal and have been granted a new trial for the first-degree murder of Bich. This is a pivotal development in the case, but oddly, the filmmakers decline to elaborate further, leaving viewers to do their own research about the 2023 decision. (The court ruled that the judge mistakenly suggested there were only two possible scenarios for the attack, precluding the jury from considering alternatives that would result in lesser charges.) It's never a good sign when key updates are conveyed solely through text, and even worse when those updates prove more shocking than the crime itself.

What Jennifer Did is hardly the first true-crime documentary to be accompanied by an overwhelming sense of "duh." Recent months have seen a host of similarly surface-level projects, including Crime Scene Berlin: Nightlife Killer and Max's They Called Him Mostly Harmless, while networks like Investigation Discovery and Oxygen continue to pump out predictable case-of-the-week content. In fact, the Pan case is eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding the 2012 murder of Mary Ann Murphy, which was featured in the Season 2 premiere of ID's Mean Girl Murders in late March. The most notable difference between the two is their respective runtimes: While Mean Girl Murders takes only 40 minutes to explain that Keri Murphy committed matricide because Mary Ann forbade her from seeing girlfriend Rebecca Keller, What Jennifer Did spends 90 minutes meandering toward a parallel conclusion.

These documentaries all struggle in their own way, but What Jennifer Did, which blatantly telegraphs Pan's guilt via its title, may be the most egregious of the bunch. While true crime still has the potential to bring about meaningful change and give voice to victims who have been ignored, for now, the genre is firmly in its flop era as streamers and networks attempt to mine even the slightest bit of intrigue from clear-cut cases that hardly deserve the feature-length documentary treatment. In that respect, perhaps the right question here isn't "What did Jennifer do?" but rather, "What hath the true-crime boom wrought?"

What Jennifer Did is streaming on Netflix.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.