Case in point, Netflix's Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel which was trending this weekend. Produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.
Four episodes of stringing you along, manipulating your emotions and insulting your intelligence, endless slow-mo dramatization, repetitive speculation, misleading diversions and blind alleys, just ugh. Could have been done in 45 minutes.
It's a riveting enough story: a girl disappears at a notoriously dangerous hotel in Skid Row, Los Angeles, is last seen in mysterious elevator footage where she clearly appears to be hallucinating (though they don't pursue the question until like episode 3), then is found 19 days later floating in the hotel's water tower on the roof.
Bizarre, but we don't learn UNTIL EPISODE 3 (I think) that she was bipolar 1 -- wall-to-wall murder mystery up to that point -- and not until episode 4 that she'd gone off her meds. The answer to how she got in the tank and closed the lid after her (which would have been impossible) is deliberately avoided: they let you believe the lid was found closed until the end of episode 4 when they reveal that oh, actually, it was found open.
Also not disclosed until the end: the police had released an edited version of the elevator footage that was supposed to make it easier to recognize her (there was a search underway), which was throwing gasoline on conspiracy theories. But you, dear stupid viewer, don't need to know this as we unfold our tale irresistibly.
Most of the series is spent taking attention-seeking conspiracy-hunting "web sleuths" seriously in their obsession with foul play, undeterred by their lack of access to evidence (the police would have found her cocktail of meds on day one, the parents would have disclosed her condition). Patched up at the end with lessons learned and some hokey stuff about how the girl left a legacy of inspiration for people struggling with mental illness, after they'd spent four hours ruthlessly sensationalizing her grisly death, including plenty of fake slow-mo footage of a naked body floating in a tank.
We're a terrible culture.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this sort of thing, but.
Four episodes of stringing you along, manipulating your emotions and insulting your intelligence, endless slow-mo dramatization, repetitive speculation, misleading diversions and blind alleys, just ugh. Could have been done in 45 minutes.
It's a riveting enough story: a girl disappears at a notoriously dangerous hotel in Skid Row, Los Angeles, is last seen in mysterious elevator footage where she clearly appears to be hallucinating (though they don't pursue the question until like episode 3), then is found 19 days later floating in the hotel's water tower on the roof.
Bizarre, but we don't learn UNTIL EPISODE 3 (I think) that she was bipolar 1 -- wall-to-wall murder mystery up to that point -- and not until episode 4 that she'd gone off her meds. The answer to how she got in the tank and closed the lid after her (which would have been impossible) is deliberately avoided: they let you believe the lid was found closed until the end of episode 4 when they reveal that oh, actually, it was found open.
Also not disclosed until the end: the police had released an edited version of the elevator footage that was supposed to make it easier to recognize her (there was a search underway), which was throwing gasoline on conspiracy theories. But you, dear stupid viewer, don't need to know this as we unfold our tale irresistibly.
Most of the series is spent taking attention-seeking conspiracy-hunting "web sleuths" seriously in their obsession with foul play, undeterred by their lack of access to evidence (the police would have found her cocktail of meds on day one, the parents would have disclosed her condition). Patched up at the end with lessons learned and some hokey stuff about how the girl left a legacy of inspiration for people struggling with mental illness, after they'd spent four hours ruthlessly sensationalizing her grisly death, including plenty of fake slow-mo footage of a naked body floating in a tank.
We're a terrible culture.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this sort of thing, but.
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