Murdered at First Sight

When your TV pitch is, "What if we used Victim Impact Statements as the synopsis?" this tabloid trash is the result.

Slovenly to the point of worthless, this grovelling series seems to campaign for sainthood of the victims while reducing the attackers to clichéd villains.

Cynical commercialisation of victim's families, police and other crime professionals by using their contributions to add undeserved credibility to this flyweight series.

Almost no analysis specific to the each case, just editing the contributors into childish good guy, bad guy storytelling.

Yes, this is VERY slow. They also reiterate basic points over, and over, and over again. But my main concern is that the first 10 minutes leading up to the day of the murder, they show a bunch of photos of the victim. This usually isn't a problem, but they are all childhood pictures. They don't mention that the victim was actually an adult until we get to the day of the crime. You spend 10 minutes thinking a child was murdered, then instantly find out that they were a mother or father. After the crime details they start to show the victim as an adult, which goes to show that they DO have photos of the victim as an adult, but they made a decision to only show childhood photos leading up to the crime. And any narration by the victim's family is aligned with the childhood photos. "He was such a skaterboy." It is not like they are showing childhood photos and telling us that the victim "loved being a lawyer." Maybe give the viewer some hints that we are focused on events 10+ years before the crime happened and NOT events right before the crime, which is very easy to assume. It does the victims a disservice. We don't learn about them as they were when the crime happened during the point in the show when we should be learning about them. It is like the 10+ years before the crime are not covered like the childhood years. Everything in the first 10 minutes is explicitly about the victim as a child. We go from 10 minutes of learning about a child to finding out he was hitchhiking to another state to take care of his newborn daughter. This daughter was basically glossed over for 8 minutes but it seems that she was the most important person in the victim's life and was the basis for all of his motivations. We don't seem to hear from police that often either. This is probably why the victim's story is so odd. We don't really hear about any other false leads and suspects. It seems like most of the story is from the victim's family, which is great, but there are road bumps that get in the way. We don't hear too much about road bumps. And since this is a stranger on stranger crime show, we hear very little about the points in the investigation where the police suspect those closest to the victims. We go from learning about the day of the crime to the beginning of the fork/branch of the investigation that leads to the stranger. Often enough, there is much that happens between the day after the crime happened until they get on the correct path of the true perpetrator. We really don't learn about these events. This is true crime. It just seems a little too heavy handed in its composition. They way we get from points A,B, and C are a little too forced. This is still a decent show because stranger on stranger murder is rare. I just wish they would stop "window dressing" for the viewer. Fill in these slow points with more information. Get some actual research into these stories from third-parties like local reporters and investigators, and people not related to the victim. Let's spend more time on the police and what they did to catch these creeps. It feels like this show is the way that it is because they don't have this information so they fill it with repetition. I hate that I have to hit the 10 second skip button often enough. It is so wasteful. (Like having the sink water running too long). All those minutes could be filled with information. "And that is all that I have to say about that."

Thankfully devoid of cheesy reenactments that are common in lower-end US true crime series. But this has got to be the slowest true crime show I've ever seen. Before the halfway point of episode one I was already wondering when it would ever end. Made an hour feel like two.

Perhaps the victims' families get some sort of cathartic benefit from talking at length about their lost loved ones, but for viewers who didn't know the victims there's way too much of that in this show.

Perhaps that sounds uncaring, but it's merely a comment on the watchability (or lack thereof) of this particular series.

It would make for better viewing if two or three cases were profiled in every episode. As it is, it's doubtful this series will find a large following since there's very little "meat" for an hour long show.