Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sasha Reid And The Midnight Order’ On Freeform, A Docuseries About A Group Of Women Who Get In The Minds Of Serial Killers

Sasha Reid And The Midnight Order sounds like the title of a mystery novel series or a Netflix crime procedural, but it’s actually a docuseries on Freeform about a Canadian criminologist and a group of young women who help her investigate cold case murders.

SASHA REID AND THE MIDNIGHT ORDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we see scenes of a snowy river in Ontario, we hear a woman on a phone talk about how she started thinking that her husband was a serial killer. Dr. Sasha Reid opens a massive, twice-folded piece of cardboard sent to her by that caller.

The Gist: Dr. Sasha Reid has a PhD in developmental psychology and teaches at the University of Calgary, where she’s looking to get a law degree. As she mentions, she has created the world’s largest database of serial killers. She’s looked at profiles of hundreds of killers, as well as their victims, and used data science to make a much more complex picture of these killers than law enforcement has ever seen. What she wants to do is to help identify the killers of victims whose cases have gone cold or been mostly ignored, like Indigenous women across Canada.

To help with her investigations, she has a group of six women that are called The Midnight Order: Anjali Arora, Marina Jarenova, Ayah Ellithy, Sasha Reid , Florence Tang, Hana Georgoulis, and Hasti Pourriahi. They come from diverse backgrounds; some are native Canadians, others have come to the country from places like Iran. All of them have a keen interest in what Reid is doing and they bring different specialties to the group.

The first investigation is sparked by the aforementioned woman, whom Reid calls “Veronica”, thinking her husband, whom is given the name “Archie”, is a serial killer. The woman who contacted Reid thinks a group of unsolved killings of young women in and around London, Ontario starting in the early 1980s might be his victims.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sasha Reid And The Midnight Order has the feeling of another cold-case docuseries, Unsolved Mysteries. It also recalls Mindhunter, David Fincher’s two-season miracle about the formation of the FBI’s serial crime unit.

Our Take: There are parts of Sasha Reid And The Midnight Order, directed by Nancy Schwartzman, with Maija Norris as the showrunner, that are fascinating to watch, but there are also just as many things about the viewing experience that are frustrating. Most of the frustrating parts are involved in how the show is presented, with Schwartzman and Norris determined to make the show look and feel like a fictional crime procedural (we won’t say “scripted”, for good reasons) that you might watch on Freeform or somewhere similar.

There are moments where Reid and her “Midnight Order” feel like they’re doing things more for show than actually getting somewhere that gets them closer to identifying the killer of those women from 40 years ago. In one scene, Reid and three of the group venture to the river where one of the bodies was found, just to get a “feel” for what the killer might be thinking. Sure, that might have helped. But, Reid is the oldest of the group and she’s only 35; to go to the scene of a crime that happened years before any of them were born to try to get a feel for what the killer did seems more like it’s being done for the cameras.

Subsets of the group interview law enforcement officials, and those interviews don’t seem to give them any new information. In fact, some of the interviews look like they were semi-rehearsed.

One of the things we wonder is if this collection of data that Reid and her group gather leads to finding concrete evidence that can tie a person to these cold cases. After all, even with the data science Reid uses to come up with possible suspects, law enforcement can’t act on it unless it leads to hard evidence.

An interesting interview was with an area police detective who worked on cold cases; he says that at times they hold whatever remaining DNA evidence they have so it’s not used up, despite improving technology. The idea is not to jump at the new technology if you don’t have a solid lead that the technology will be able to link the evidence to. Let’s hope that notion is explored more, because Reid and the group really need to create those solid leads to give law enforcement the impetus to revisit the physical evidence.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The group texts each other about a drawing the sister of one of the victims showed them; it matches the sketch of “Archie” that “Veronica” sent them.

Sleeper Star: All of the women in the Midnight Order are whip-smart and are dedicated to getting to the truth.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure why, but our screener had a lot of blurred-out photos, despite the fact that those photos were part of newspaper clippings and web articles. Did the producers not get permission to show those photos?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sasha Reid And The Midnight Order doesn’t need to be a slickly-made to communicate what Reid and her team do to help solve cold cases. But if you can get through that slick stuff, there’s a lot of good sleuthing to watch.

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.