What's Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story About?

Steven Stayner's 1972 kidnapping serves as the entry point into this three-part docuseries about his abduction, his improbable return, the TV movie that was made about his ordeal, and the sordid development years later that pushed an already devastating story in an even darker direction.

Who's involved?

• Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors of the Avengers movies, serve as executive producers on the series.
• Director Jessica Dimmock also helmed the Netflix doc Flint Town, as well as one episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
• Kay Stayner, Steven's mother, offers candid recollections of one of the most horrifying experiences a parent can endure, but she has palpable ambivalence toward the role the media has played in her family's life.
• Ashley Stayner, Steven's adult daughter, struggles with how much of her father's life she doesn't or can't know, balanced with her warm memories of him as a dad.
• Corin Nemec, who was Emmy nominated for playing the role of teenage Steven Stayner in the NBC miniseries I Know My First Name Is Steven, now reads the words of Steven's interviews with law enforcement and screenwriters.
• Todd Andrews, who played Steven's brother Cary in the TV movie, reads Cary's own words, which adds a chilling dimension after the audience learns what became of him.

Why (and to whom) do we recommend it?

Captive Audience takes on a herculean task in the span of three episodes. First, it has to tell the story of Steven Stayner, who was abducted blocks away from his home in northern California, not far from Yosemite National Park. As most child abduction stories are, Steven's is a terrifying tale of a young and trusting boy who was preyed upon by a monster. Said monster molested and raped Steven, an aspect that is acknowledged but not lingered upon by the documentarians, one of several examples of the Captive Audience producers making an effort to reckon with the exploitative nature of true crime.

For much of the series, there is a pretty significant tension between the desire to tell a traditional true-crime story and the acknowledgment that a family's pain is the terrain upon which such a story treads. Steven's return home after seven years in captivity made national news, and the TV movie that followed was a huge hit for NBC, which only increased the scrutiny, attention, and demand for answers. You can feel this tension in many of the interviews with Steven's family. His mother and his children are all open, to one degree or another, to the interview process, but there's a wariness in all of them when it comes to the prospect of once again surrendering their stories to Hollywood.

In its attempt to reckon with true-crime media's role in the Stayners' story, Captive Audience's producers employ audio recordings of screenwriter J.P. Miller, as well as having Nemec and Andrews revisit the people they played so many decades ago. This kind of introspective meta-narrative calls to mind recent documentary projects like Kate Plays Christine and Casting JonBenet, both of which wrestled with an inherent ghoulishness that comes with depicting true crime as entertainment.

And yet as interesting and admirable as all that wrestling is, the most compelling parts of the series remain the tried-and-true crime documentary parts. During the seven years that Steven was abducted, his kidnapper passed him off as his own son, known then as "Daniel," letting him attend school, make friends, and have a girlfriend. Captive Audience's interviews with Daniel's frienhappened in their midst.

It's not until the series' third episode where the most sordid and improbable aspect of the Stayner family saga comes to light. The mere fact that one family found itself at two very different ends of horrific crimes almost demands a narrative tidiness that neither the filmmakers nor the facts can provide. Attempts are made to draw a clean line from Steven's abduction, and the havoc it wreaked on his family, to what occured years later, but the pieces connect at jagged ends. In in this, it's perhaps a story that's too big to be told in a TV documentary. As Kay Stayner says in the opening minutes of the series, "Not many true stories have a happy ending." Captive Audience does its best to acknowledge that jaggedness and tell the Stayner family's story as responsibly as it can. That may cause frustration for some, but it feels appropriate.

Pairs well with

• I Know My First Name Is Steven is available on DVD (but alas not streaming), if you want a fuller picture of the media's depiction of Steven's story.
• Casting JonBenet, the 2017 Netflix documentary, zeroes in on the way that these true crime stories become centers of gravity unto themselves.
• Kate Plays Christine features actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to play real-life news reporter Christine Chubbuck, who in 1974 committed suicide on live television.