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The Lesson is Murder

serial killers

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In the ABC News docuseries The Lesson Is Murder, Dr. Bryanna Fox, a former FBI profiler and now a criminology professor at the University of South Florida, and her team of graduate students reinvestigate serial killer cases. What they hope to do is get into the minds of these killers, trying to figure out their motives, what sparked the urge to kill and then continue killing, and what about their background might have led the person to murder.

THE LESSON IS MURDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Scenes from the first episode of The Lesson Is Murder, with one victim saying “there’s no better place for a serial killer to hide than in a hospital.”

The Gist: The first episode centers around Will Davis, a Texas nurse who was convicted for killing four patients at the hospital where he worked in 2017, and is implicated in up to 12 total cases. These patients weren’t the ones under his care, but a rash of deaths of patients that were supposed to pull through got the hospital and the police department in the city of Tyler to investigate. It turns out that the victims died from air embolisms, due to the introduction of air into their arterial lines. CCTV footage implicated Davis.

Dr. Fox and her team speak to Davis’ mother, his ex-wife, a friend of a girlfriend he had when he was young, as well as victims that survived and families of victims that didn’t. A picture emerges of a man who was under financial pressure and made the excuse that he did this to the patients in order for them to be sicker longer so he could clock more hours. But that made little sense, since many of these patients died and there were plenty of hours to be had at the hospital.

Then details about his childhood, where he suffered from depression due to never feeling like he could satisfy his loving but critical father, and stories about his controlling nature get Dr. Fox and her team closer to an explanation. Finally, Dr. Fox does a prison interview with Davis, who talks about the euphoria he felt when he was killing his victims, something that amazed her and her team during their debrief.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The tone of The Lesson Is Murder matches most of ABC News Studios’ docuseries, like Killing County.

Our Take: There’s a certain glibness to The Lesson Is Murder that we couldn’t shake. It’s almost as if Dr. Fox and her team were taking on a fictional series of murders instead of real murders with real victims. We felt that the producers of the series were trying to shoehorn the students into certain roles in order for the audience to connect to the team, and it felt like their investigation was detached from the human element of these cases.

As we said, these crimes have real victims and real families whose lives were destroyed by these killers. And it feels like Dr. Fox and her team take in just enough information from this cohort to shape their perception of the killer in question, but don’t dwell on how much this killer affected their lives. Maybe it’s in an effort to just stick to the facts, but it also puts us at the same distance as the team, and that made us feel uncomfortable.

The team of grad students are sharp and observant, but they don’t particularly adhere to the roles that they’re given at the top of the show. One is supposed to be “the skeptic”, who challenges every assertion the team makes. One is the “data specialist,” for instance, and another is focused on the victims instead of the killer. But in the process of investigating Davis’ case, each person took on stances that were outside their “role.”

It felt more like brainstorming rather than an investigation, which is absolutely fine, but it makes the producers’ wedging the team members into certain roles all the more ridiculous. At a certain point, a team member has to remind himself and his teammates that these are people they’re looking at, not “data points,” which seemed obvious to us.

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Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Surprisingly, Davis admitted to a “mercy killing” of a 96-year-old patient in 2016, so Dr. Fox called that admission into her contact at the Tyler police department.

Sleeper Star: When he sits down with Dr. Fox, Davis jokes that his suit wasn’t tailored in time for the interview. He also claims he’s going to heaven. Being superficially charming was part of Davis’ profile, and we could definitely see that when he sat down with Dr. Fox. But he never seemed to express any sort of remorse, either.

Most Pilot-y Line: Reenactments are minimal, but they did keep showing repeated shots of the back of the head of an actor playing Davis.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While the investigations at the heart of The Lesson Is Murder are interesting, we just couldn’t deal with the detached nature of how the investigation was presented. It felt more like people putting together a puzzle than trying to bring closure to families and survivors, and that’s the part that leaves us cold.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.