Death in the Dorms

This is the true crime drama equivalent of an Arby's restaurant. It is trashy, salacious, and gross. The idea is to examine stories where university students have been murdered - and I guess come up with some sort of conclusions as to the dangers facing the young. There was one aspect of the series that I really didn't like and one aspect of the series that I really did like. The first is that several of the interviewees mention that it is so sad because the victim never got to experience University life in its fullness. And it seems to have been a line that was fed to them by the producers of this crime documentary. Connected to that, I dislike the premise of this series. It is clear just by the stories that they present that these are not crimes that make any sort of pattern. There are people who are murdered by rapists, people who are murdered by jealous boyfriends, people were murdered during hazing rituals gone bad. Only one of those things could only happen in a university setting because the hazing was connected to a fraternity. Part that I liked about it is that they actually go into great detail about the investigation of the crime. They talk about the real grunt work of police work that it takes to solve a crime, and I found that interesting. I also like the fact that a police officer is being interviewed, and he says that there's probably not enough evidence to convict one person who is charged with the crime, and they ask him his opinion whether he's innocent or not, and he straight up says that in his opinion there was trial, and he wasn't convicted therefore he's innocent. I think that's refreshing in this genre - and I think if most police officers took that approach when being interviewed for these kinds of things, then the families would understand that not everybody charged with a crime is guilty of the crime.

The series tells of extremely traumatic murders but the music is so dreadful and ruins it. There's literally a new loud trashy song every 15 seconds that cheapens it and takes away from the stories. The music is almost like it should be in a teenage reality show.

As someone that watches hundreds of true crime series, I would've preferred more from the investigators. And how they caught / investigated the murders.

It's a shame the music takes away from the seriousness of the content because young people could learn more about safety and being careful.

Season 2 music is worse (if you can believe it) than series 1. I actually signed up to IMDB just to give this review.

These weird little music videos at the beginning of each episode were unnecessary and totally strange. I found the cases themselves interesting but the dramatic scripted storytelling from 3rd parties really weakens my enjoyment of a true-crime documentary. I wouldn't recommend anything else produced by these doc producers. They have the same salacious tone as a bad true crime podcast. Fine if you want something to watch and you aren't distracted by overtly dramatic storytelling and commentary from people who were not at all involved in the victims or offenders lives. It comes off like gossip imo.

Every episode has this loud unnecessary music after every 4 sentences spoken. Ok ok I get it...it's traumatic and horrible but the sloooow story reveal with the lame music mix was annoying. Slow motion visual with again loud pop music with each scene got old real quick. These episodes could easily have been 15 minutes each and told the same story. These are important stories but it felt like borderline sensationalism. Oh and the parents who dealt with their loss and grief by creating foundations? Really? I'm always surprised at the amount of foundations that people form to celebrate a short life and then these same foundations are gone in under 5 years. It comes off as somewhat arrogant and self serving while the spotlight is in them.

Oh well. Nice try.

The good parts about this show is that there's a large amount of research, interviews, and very serious and sad cases. All of this is just unwound by the extremely awful and loud music choices to try and make this series more dramatic than it needs to be. The focus really needs to be on the victims; not on the incessant and trashy and even super upbeat music they like playing randomly throughout each of the episodes. Each of and every one of these murders is pretty tragic because it features perpetrators who are just so evil or who are just downright idiotic and sometimes they get the justice they deserve and sometimes they don't. This show really needs to look at better done documentaries and take lessons from them.