Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lorena’ On Amazon Prime, Jordan Peele’s Docuseries About The Infamous Case Of John and Lorena Bobbitt

Where were you when you heard that Lorena Bobbitt cut off the penis of her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, in 1993? Did you laugh? Did you enjoy John’s appearances on talk shows and on Howard Stern’s show? Did you like Lorena’s photo shoot in Vanity Fair? Of course you did; we did, too. But the case was more than the media circus around it indicated it was, and the new docuseries Lorena tries to dig deeper in examining what led up to Lorena doing what she did. Read on for more…

LORENA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A picture of a television playing Lorena Bobbitt’s appearance on the Steve Harvey show, with Harvey making jokes about how authorities found John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis in a field, covered in grass.

The Gist: Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 26 years, you know about the case of John and Lorena Bobbitt: In 1993 Lorena cut off John’s penis and tossed it out of her car. She claims it was in a fit of rage after yet another incident where her husband forced her to have sex. John’s claim is that she wasn’t happy with the sex — he came first and she didn’t — and cut his member off in a fit of rage.

What the first part of the four-part docuseries examines is the night of the incident, with Manassas, VA law enforcement officials talking about their memories of how the call came in and how delicate they had to be while discussing it over publicly-scannable police radios. The microsurgeon and urologist gleefully talk about the surgery that reattached John’s missing penis, and the discussion of how the news media tried to approach this case was also discussed.

But the bigger focus of this first episode was the aftermath and how the spouses’ respective claims were treated from an early-’90s perspective, when incidents of spousal abuse were even more severely underreported than they are now. It seemed unheard of back then that a man forcing his wife to have sex could be seen as abuse. The abuse case against John that was generated from Lorena’s penisectomy is also examined in part one; he was exonerated, but mainly because the state of Virginia couldn’t really build a case based on the laws on the books at the time.

Both John Wayne Bobbitt and Lorena Bobbitt are interviewed in this series; Lorena contends to this day that she was the victim of abuse, while John contends that she was unstable and violent, and the only reason why she attacked him was because he asked her for a divorce.

Our Take: Unlike most true-crime docuseries we’re seeing on streaming services in recent years, the first part of Lorena moves along quickly, moving past the incident that has been a source of guffaws for over a quarter-century and really getting to the heart of a case that was screaming for a new perspective.

That faster pace is likely due to the influence of executive producer Jordan Peele, who we could have seen collaborating with director/EP Joshua Rofé to dig deeper into the case and frame it against today’s #MeToo environment instead of just saying “haw haw they found that guy’s penis in the grass.” They even go so far as to actually show pictures of John’s severed penis to emphasize that this was an extreme response to pretty extreme circumstances, not just fodder for Jay Leno, David Letterman and Howard Stern.

It’s a welcome take on the infamous case, and it was a coup for Rofé and Peele to not only get interviews with both Lorena, who seems to acquit herself well, and John, who… uh, let’s say he hasn’t gotten much smarter with age. The first part doesn’t try to demonize either person: Lorena was a pretty Ecuadorian who might have been pushed too far, and John was the ramrod-straight ex-Marine who, as his defense attorney says, doesn’t really have a complex-enough mind to lie very well.

But we see hints of what’s coming, especially as we see clips of John on various talk shows after he recovered from his surgery. The view at the time was that he was the victim and Lorena was the “batshit chick” who did the unthinkable. But as time has gone on, especially as we’ve heard more from Lorena in recent years, that perception has changed. And we’re thinking that the other three parts of the show will go into that in-depth, especially as her trial, where she was acquitted of all charges, is examined.

Sex and Skin: Did we mention the picture of John’s severed penis? Now we can’t unsee that thing.

Parting Shot: John’s trial ends, and he’s acquitted of abuse charges. Archival news footage then sets the stage for Lorena’s trial, where cameras will be allowed.

Sleeper Star: Joseph and Diana Fletchers, neighbors of the Bobbitts, are only in two or three interview snippets, but boy are they fun to watch, between dealing wit their dog and Joseph’s massive oxygen machine.

Most Pilot-y Line: Dr. James Shen, the urologist on the case and Dr. David Berman, the microsurgeon, are a little too gleeful and laugh a bit too much when they describe the case. Yes, it sounds funny on the surface, but their tone doesn’t match the seriousness of the case.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Lorena doesn’t drag, and it goes deeper on a case that most people have only surface impressions about.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Lorena on Amazon Prime