That's partly down to a slimmer runtime than the show would have had 20 years ago - this is true across TV genres, actually, but when I watch a 47-minute episode from back in the day, I find almost all of the extra 5-6 minutes is trimmable fat - but I suspect producers understand just how many programming choices the audience has compared to 20 years ago, too, and know they have to keep things moving.Īmerican Justice's premiere is just as solid. It's well paced, too: interviewees give process-y insight into what findings mean, and there's little draggy B-roll or extraneous summarizing at the act breaks. The first episode's topic is smartly chosen a Florida man (.of course) disappears during a solo hunting trip, and while authorities insist that he was eaten by alligators, there's actually a love triangle in play. Kurtis's familiar baritone is the aural equivalent of a Proustian madeleine, both authoritative and confiding, and it's nice to reunite with it. I've seen the premieres of the two new-and-improved shows and enjoyed them both, so let's start with Cold Case Files, for which Bill Kurtis is once again back in the voice-over chair.
I can't speak for the segment of the audience that doesn't remember the originals, but to THIS reviewer, it looks like A&E bet correctly. True crime has evolved over the last two or three decades, but for a lot of us, A&E's case overviews - and the plummy voice-overs by veteran journo Bill Kurtis, who took his narration seriously and himself not very - were formative to our interest in the subject.īut is there still a place for the meticulous but predictable brand of true crime of times gone by? A&E is betting there is, bringing back both Cold Case Files and American Justice this week with new episodes and, in the case of American Justice, a new narrator ( 24's Dennis Haysbert).
Cold Case Files and American Justice (and, to an extent, City Confidential, although that one felt more lurid) were what passed for "prestige" true-crime programming at the turn of the millennium, introducing many a rainy-Sunday channel-surfer to the "documentary justice" genre and to the headline cases that fuel its engine. We had the famous original Unsolved Mysteries we had the primetime newsmags like 20/20 and 48 Hours we had the occasional Lifetime movie or sweeps-period miniseries and we had A&E's somber, soothing selection of shows. Return with me now to those days before streaming services and DVRs, when TV's true-crime menu was relatively short. Her weekly column here on Primetimer is dedicated to all things true-crime TV. Bunting knows a thing or two about true crime. The editor-in-chief of the daily newsletter Best Evidence, Sarah D.
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