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It’s the obsession that’s captivated all of America: Netflix’s exquisite 10-part true crime documentary series Making a Murderer. In case you’ve been living under a rock — or, like me, were “off the grid” for much of the holiday season — the series follows the two criminal trials and subsequent convictions of Steven Avery. The Wisconsin man was first wrongfully convicted of rape in 1985. Only after he wasted away for 18 years in prison, new DNA evidence came to light that proved that he had been the target of a unfair trial. He subsequently became a national celebrity and filed a $36 million federal lawsuit against Manitowoc County. It seemed that justice was finally served — until he found himself the prime suspect in the case of Teresa Halbach’s murder.
The docu-series has received universal acclaim for how it brilliantly exposes our national legal system as being unfairly biased against the economic lower class. It quickly becomes obvious that Avery and his teenaged nephew Brendan Dassey were being framed by the very local justice system that the family was trying to ruin and upend. It’s meticulously constructed and tugs on your heartstrings by showing you the horrifying lengths to which Manitowoc County will go to ruin these two men. Everyone on social media loves it! Even Alec Baldwin! And yet, while I find myself completely fascinated with the show, there’s something about the series itself that has nagged me since the opening scene: It’s so incredibly biased.
Before you raise your hand in objection, I’m not trying to discredit the thesis of the piece. I truly believe that the evidence proves that Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey received an unfair trial. I’m also not asserting that Avery and Dassey actually did murder Halbach. I’m not hatching conspiracy theories here. I’m merely saying that filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos might have done their job in arguing for Steven Avery’s innocence a little too well for my personal taste.
Sometimes I feel as though the filmmakers are presenting the facts in such an emotionally manipulative way that even if I want to feel even slightly skeptical about Steven Avery’s innocence, I’m immediately made to feel guilty. When key facts are revealed, they’ll tighten on Avery family photos that show Steven Avery as a sweet-faced, wide-eyed boy. They’ll pair devastating calls to Steven and Brendan in prison with sweeping shots of the Avery’s salvage yard. The rows and columns of broken down cars only evoke the fall of the American auto industry and the broken promise of the American dream. Indeed, far more attention is paid to turning Avery and his downtrodden family into victims than in presenting the actual victim, Teresa Halbach, as a fully-formed human being. This is where I think both season one of Serial and HBO’s The Jinx: The Life And Deaths of Robert Durst supersede Making a Murderer on the true crime spectrum, as both of those series made a point to humanize their victims and cast doubt on their primary subject’s guilt or innocence. Serial‘s Sarah Koenig devotes an entire episode to all the facts that stack against Adnan Sayed, and in The Jinx, Robert Durst is given the opportunity to present a different side of the story.
I understand that Making a Murderer was a project ten years in the making. Ricciardi and Demos had the unenviable task of editing a massive trial down into ten digestible hours of content. Furthermore, as documentarians, it’s their job to find a narrative around which to frame all their footage. Laying out a step-by-step argument for why Steven Avery received an unfair trial was the right thing for the filmmakers to do (and it didn’t hurt that the pro-Avery side gave them far more access than the people stumping for the prosecution). The irony is that in presenting such a detailed argument for why Steven Avery must be innocent, Making a Murderer has tipped off the part of my brain that believes there are two sides to every story. As I’m watching the show, I consistently feel the shadow of all those cleverly cut facts. And this really pisses me off as a viewer.
It seems I’m not the only one asking “What did Making a Murderer leave out?” There are a plethora of articles that list all the inflammatory rumors and incriminating facts the Netflix documentary nimbly skips over. Most of these details don’t change the general argument that Manitowoc County planted evidence on Avery’s property to present a case skewed against him, nor do they explain why Dassey’s clearly coerced confessions were considered evidence. What they do, though, is present a more complicated portrait of Steven Avery. It seems that Ricciardi and Demos edited out the telephone calls where Brendan Dassey admits that Avery molested him as a child and that they chose not to include the facts that Avery was accused of other rapes in the area. There’s also a fascinating Milwaukee Mag article from 2006 available online that details both sides of the case and features the revelation that Avery had a history of attempting to coerce teen family members into performing sexual acts: “Years ago, when Steven was first sent to prison and [his brother] Earl was 14 or 15, Steven would call him from his cell block and order Earl to have sex with Steven’s then-wife, Lori.”
Even if these details were included, Making A Murderer would still prove that Avery received an unfair trial. So why cut them out? Probably to present a more compelling narrative for viewers. It’s still easier to explain that the justice system fails when it puts a completely innocent man behind bars than it is to argue that the justice system fails when it’s slanted to put a man who may or may not be guilty in prison. The problem is that by omitting these counter-arguments the series is presenting its very own potentially unjustly biased version of the truth. Then again, Making a Murderer doesn’t have to be fair and balanced. It’s not the law, after all.
