michiganave_p

This feels like another superficial attempt by this Trainwreck series to only talk to the participants of what happened, without having a deeper dive or actually any experts who were not involved included in this thing to explain how this happened.

It is extremely clear how illiterate the participants are with technology and don't have a good grasp on how tech, social networks or algorithms work, however the showrunners thought it would be best just to blame this as a human behavior problem and not a technology problem, which is how this problem started in the first place: On Facebook.

This whole event was triggered when one user made the mistake of not setting a birthday party invite to private, saw her mistake, then tried to fix it on Facebook's mobile UI but couldn't because of its limitation to edit invites, and then the FB algorithmic took control to maximize reach to as many users as possible and turned this one mistake into a huge riot.

Additionally, Meta would not remove posts which were promoting the fake event, which multiple people and government officials were saying was not a real party and would also cause major safety concerns.

None of this was discussed during the documentary, and there's appears to be no attempt by the show's producers to out to Meta for a comment. Instead, all the blame was shifted to the people involved, and not the tools or platforms they were using.

I was expecting more of an independent look or balance in this thing going into it, and it seems there are 25% of the people interviewed are or for the victims of Sandusky, and the other are 75% on the side of Paterno or the school pleading ignorance.

None of the people important to establishing a third-party POV to the situation, like Sara Ganim, state or local officials, ex-school officials, etc. Are interviewed which is beyond disappointing as it doesn't provide any additional context to this situation. It is a very binary presentation of what happened in Happy Valley.

It doesn't help the last part of the show is a defense of Joe Paterno from all of his allies and family. I'm sure PSU fans loved it, but the rest of the audience does not understand why this had to be a part of the film.

The trial scenes were okay, even though it is not nearly what happened in real life with the sentencing of the remaining church members, but at least it wrapped up that storyline.

The really bad attempt at storytelling was how Oklahoma City unfolded, and specifically the bombing itself, where the series ended at that awful visual effects package of the bombing. Seriously, that must be the worst VFX of the year by 2022-23 standards. It's like they spent a few hundred dollars on it and had a kid work on it from his basement. It was that cheap and just plain awful of a visual effect.

As for the story leading up to the OKC bombing, there was really no lead up beyond the Elohim City storyline. Nothing about the Nichols, the process of prepping the bomb, or any of the blunders made by McVey which is how he got caught in the first place.

Just a poor attempt overall at a series.