Netflix’s ‘The Innocent Man’ is Better Than ‘Making a Murderer’ For One Key Reason

It’s hard to watch any true crime docuseries on Netflix and not think of Making a Murderer. Borrowing from the prestigious cult hit The Staircase and catering to the same fanbase that devoured Season 1 of Serial, Making a Murderer rocked the docuseries landscape. It was glorious film-making focused on the unraveling of one man’s life. It won a slew of honors and inspired a sub-genre of imitators. Making a Murderer was a pop culture landmark, but it was not perfect. (At least, I never thought it was.)

Netflix’s latest true crime offering, The Innocent Man, has all the trappings of a Making a Murderer knock-off. It’s a technically dazzling documentary series about how the warped criminal justice system wrongfully convicted four innocent men of two grisly murders. However, The Innocent Man is more than just a Making a Murderer clone; it’s an improvement on that original series. Its narrative is tighter, its blows more devastating, and its storytelling is far more balanced. While Making a Murderer was a fairly biased deep dive into one man’s battle against the justice system, The Innocent Man is a meditation on the trauma that ripples out and ruins whole communities in the wake of one crime.

The Innocent Man is based on best-selling author John Grisham’s sole work of nonfiction. Both the book and the show tell the story of a gristly duet of murders that struck the small town of Ada, Oklahoma in the early 1980s. In 1982, someone entered Debra Sue Carter’s apartment to rape, beat, and strangle her (with her own belt). Then, in 1984, Denice Harraway was abducted from the gas station mart where she worked, and also killed. Both murders haunted the local community, and both cases led to the wrongful convictions of four men, two of which are still in prison fighting appealing their verdicts and sentencing.

For me, The Innocent Man managed to do something that Making a Murderer never attempted: to really hammer home the devastation that a single murder wrecks. Making a Murderer is so focused on how Manitowoc County’s prosecution and law enforcement had it out for Steven Avery and his nephew Brandon Dassey, that it forgets that there’s still a woman who was brutally murdered at the center of the story. Teresa Hallbeck gets a little bit of screen time in Episode 2, but she is remembered in glossy terms, and used by the show’s plot as a case to solve, or a specter hampering Steven Avery’s chances for freedom and happiness.

The Innocent Man devotes its whole first episode to murder victims Debra Sue Carter and Denice Harraway. We get an intimate idea of what their lives were like, and how awful their murderers really were. I don’t just mean the visceral way in which The Innocent Man recreates the crimes — which still has me, as the kids say, “shook” — but how their loss influenced their loved ones. Carter’s mother, aunt, and cousin all have a big role to play in The Innocent Man, and as they retell how the grief broke them, fractured their relationships, and inspired them to action, you can’t help but realize that many true crime documentaries forget the mourning survivors ruined by murder. Instead, true crime is often framed like a game. (The Keepers is a vivid rebuttal to this trend, and The Innocent Man seems to have cleverly picked up narrative tips from that haunting Netflix series.)

But The Innocent Man isn’t just about the victims and their families, it’s about those titular innocent men. It’s about the corruption at the heart of the criminal justice system, and it’s about how survivors fight to heal. In short, The Innocent Man is about the never-ending reach of trauma. The docuseries examines how one murder can create a whole community of victims, forever linked by one heinously violent act and never able to escape it.

The Innocent Man premieres on Netflix Friday, December 14.

Watch The Innocent Man on Netflix