Stream It or Skip It: ‘Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them’ on Oxygen, Where Yolanda Saldivar Gets Her Say

Oxygen’s Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them offers new insight into the killing of Selena Quintanilla, the queen of Tejano music and a crossover pop superstar in-the-making. The tragically short life of Selena has already inspired numerous adaptations, including the 1997 feature film starring Jennifer Lopez and a 2020 Netflix series featuring Christian Serratos in the lead role. Oxygen even told Selena’s story in a 2014 episode of Snapped. But this two-part docuseries stands out for one crucial — and controversial — reason: it includes interviews with convicted killer Yolanda Saldivar from prison. Does Selena & Yolanda provide new context for the superstar’s infamous end? Or should the so-called “secrets between them” have remained secret?

SELENA & YOLANDA: THE SECRETS BETWEEN THEM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: It’s a familiar vibe: the skyline of a city (in this case it’s Corpus Christi, Texas) with a date superimposed (March 31, 1995) and audio from a 911 call reporting a murder. Don’t fact check me, but I believe this is how all true crime docs open.

The Gist: Selena’s story — a rapid ascent to genre superstardom and a shocking betrayal and murder from the most unexpected of perpetrators — is one of pop culture’s most potent tragedies. Everyone remembers the spring and summer of 1995, when the Latinx community lost a beloved performer who felt poised to bring Tejano music to the masses, and when the rest of the world simultaneously discovered and mourned Selena with the posthumous release of her final album. Selena’s death, just two weeks shy of her 24th birthday, has left fans, friends, and family members with a lot of grief and even more questions. What heights could Selena’s career have hit? And why did Yolanda Saldivar, the founder and president of the Selena fan club, pull the trigger on her one-time idol and friend? While these are worthwhile questions to ponder, Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them is exclusively concerned with the latter. This is Yolanda’s story.

The first half of Oxygen’s two-parter, nearly 85 minutes in length, devotes nearly all of its runtime to Saldivar. The first part begins with Selena’s murder and the six-hour standoff between the police and Saldivar, holed up in a truck with a revolver against her temple. The doc travels up and down the timeline, from Selena’s rise to fame and the creation of her fan club (an idea Saldivar pitched to Selena’s father). We learn Saldivar’s backstory — she was the first person in her family to go to college and worked as a nurse — and more about Selena Etc., the fashion boutique that the pop idol owned independent of her father/manager.

There are the confessionals from Saldivar herself and the requisite interviews with police officers and prosecutors, as well as a Selena biographer and a modern (re: millennial) music journalist. It’s Saldivar’s niece Tina, however, who provides the doc with the necessary emotional heft. Tina also provides the doc with new information about Saldivar’s relationship with Selena — information that we’re led to believe was important enough to warrant a three-hour doc from a convicted murderer’s point of view. If you couldn’t already tell, this is an actively controversial decision on Oxygen’s part.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This is pure Oxygen true crime fare, through and through. However, the inclusion of commentary from Yolanda Saldivar — marketed as the series’ primary selling point — makes this feel more like Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer anthology.

Parting Shot: If you think Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them is going to reveal the titular secrets in the first part, think again. Saldivar promises to get into the secrets, and we end on a cliffhanger for Part 2.

Sleeper Star: Surprisingly, it’s Selena. There’s actually so little of Selena in this doc that you are left wanting to see more of her.

Most Pilot-y Line: “No one now can have a neutral perspective on who Yolanda is because of what happened.”

Our Take: The primary critique lobbed at the true crime genre is its consistent centering of the killer and the marginalization of the victims. It’s very easy for docs to fall for the idea of a criminal mastermind with an unknowable inner life who methodically plans their crimes and taunts those who wish to suss out their identity. It is very much a whole thing, and in a way Selena & Yolanda feels it flips that script.

It is true that Yolanda Saldivar’s entire being has been boiled down to the events of one day: she’s the fan club president who shot Selena dead in a motel. Her existence before and after that gunshot does not exist in the popular record. It’s also true, as the doc points out early on, that the tabloid grind in the mid-’90s was ruthless and sold millions of papers by tarnishing people — specifically women. Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith, Monica Lewinsky — all fodder for vicious tabloids who have been reappraised in a much more balanced way in recent years. So… is this Yolanda Saldivar’s I, Tonya moment? Because Selena’s death is an open-and-shut case as far as popular perception is concerned, that kinda seems like that’s what The Secrets Between Them is going for by focusing on Yolanda. And the result is kinda creepy.

The truth is that Saldivar is not a Harding or a Smith or a Lewinsky. She’s a convicted killer, so any reevaluation of her story has a much steeper hill to climb. It doesn’t help that the case as presented in the first episode of Selena & Yolanda still doesn’t amass enough evidence to prove Saldivar’s innocence, or even reframe the event as anything other than a murder. In fact, it’s hard to discern what The Secrets Between Them is even trying to do. Is it trying to prove that Selena’s death was an accident? Maybe? But there’s no thesis statement to the defense, so those who’ve already made up their mind about Saldivar will spend the entire time going, “Yeah… and?” The secrets are TBD.

There’s also the truth about how human brains work and how any story, especially one being recalled for a documentary film crew 29 years after the fact, becomes obfuscated by bias. When the doc presents evidence that the police maybe coerced an inaccurate confession out of Saldivar? Yeah, that seems plausible. When the cops don’t recall key pieces of evidence, like a purse that was locked in the motel room’s safe? Yep, that seems like selective memory bias. When all of Saldivar’s relatives express grief over the loss of their beloved aunt, an aunt that started a fan club for their favorite singer? You actually do feel for them! It’s completely understandable that they’re distraught and I can’t blame them for trying to put their aunt’s reputation into a larger context.

The problem that persists as a viewer, though, is one of imbalance. For a documentary named Selena & Yolanda, it is astonishingly light on Selena. I was actually a little startled when I first heard Selena’s voice roughly 3/4ths of the way into the first episode. There’s very little footage of Selena the performer and no trace of her music. There are no interviews with her family (understandable). Selena, normally a vibrant and captivating figure, looms like a specter over the doc. Without Selena, we’re left with Yolanda — and Selena & Yolanda doesn’t do much to change minds about Yolanda.

Our Call: It’s reasonable for Yolanda Saldivar’s family to want to try to clear her name — if that’s even what this doc is trying to do. As creepy as interviewing Saldivar from prison may be, the primary problem with Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them is that all of those secrets are stuffed into the second part, thus making this feel like a padded grab for ratings. For that, I have to give it a SKIP IT.