At Witt's End the Hunt for a Killer

I watch dozens of crime docs and I can easily say this was the biggest waste of time I have ever endured. FOUR PARTS that could easily be summed up in 10 minutes. Someone gets killed, they don't know who, they still don't know who.

Complete garbage, don't waste your time. I can't understand in this day and age how trash like this gets made. Who paid for this ?? Who produced this?? Who thought this was a good idea? Have you never seen TV before? Have you never seen a crime doc? Even writing a review about the waste of time this was seems like the show is wasting even more of my time. My hope is it will save others their time and they can watch something that is better.

ABSOLUTELY AWFUL PIECE OF TRASH.

Nothing gets solved in this aside from New finally being able to find a bottle of acetaminophen for the headache I developed from having to listen to the ANNOYING SCORE that is constantly playing behind every single word that is spoken in this "docuseries." Ridley Scott really dropped the ball on this one. I really got my hopes up when I began watching this and saw 'Ridley Scott' in the opening credits. From here forward I'll be avoiding the work of this so-called seasoned veteran. Don't waste your time watching what could have easily been summed up in less than 15 minutes. A complete and total waste of time.

Apparently most of the reviewers hated this to the point they wanted their four hours back.

But, I beg to differ. I actually thought this was really interesting. It is a rare true crime documentary that appears to follow the investigation in "real time" -- or "as it happens". And so, there is a lot of stuff that some people think is boring, but I found strangely fascinating.

I come from a law enforcement family... but I need not have that pedigree to say that crime solving is not SVU or CSI. It is a lot of dead ends and rabbit holes and making mistakes. And not solving anything.

I am so used to the normal retrospective kind of documentary series that it took me a while to figure out this series: that we were following the investigators alongside them.... as I said, in real time. And to be honest, maybe I'm nuts and imagining what I figured out.

Do you like to see how a sausage is made? This true crime series might be for you. Do you want to be introduced to a crime, watch the leads develop and see the solution? Move along, this is going to bore the living skull out of you.

What seems to have happened is that Ridley Scott may have brought a cinematic quality to a procedural crime show that is incredibly heavy on procedure. This is a show that might become popular with law enforcement officers and wannabes who enjoy seeing the actual day to day activities that go into a cold crime investigation. You hear the same cops talking endlessly about the same subjects in that very vague legal speak that covers all bases and goes nowhere, for the most part.

This series is for these people. Not for casual true crime fans.

Also, the abrupt ending to the series, with DNA tests still pending, suggest that money on the production may have run out or that maybe the filmmakers decided to move onto other projects, but it definitely leaves the viewer with a feeling of having wasted 4 hours of their lives on this exercise in police interviewing. Cause that's basically what you get. Hours of cops talking about the same things, over and over.

But the production itself looks much better than your average show. The first episode, particularly, where they get a chance to recreate the crime as it happened, is dynamic and exciting.

The series title is a perfect giveaway and metaphor. "At Witt's End" perfect, exciting, engaging. "The Hunt for a Killer" incredibly boring, pedestrian, and overly long.

The first episode was compelling but the next three got increasingly less so with each one.

The journalist who was a main commentator felt very self congratulatory, it bothered me that she seemed to repeatedly imply that she was the reason that various things were found, like because of her compassion and empathy she was responsible for getting this case some traction when nobody else around them was doing anything about it. That very well might be the case, but it just rubbed me the wrong way that here she was talking about this horrible story about what happened to this young girl and she seemed to prioritize the telling of a story in a way that made her the unspoken hero. It was distracting and I felt that it took away from the credibility of the story she was telling.

There was a lot of procedural stuff going on which can be interesting but in this case felt tedious and superfluous.

I don't know if it's just me, but I have a hard time with true crime documentaries that provide zero definitive answers. It just makes the whole thing feel somewhat anticlimactic, like OK so here's a story of another missing girl that never got found, stories like that are a dime a dozen so it's hard to invest all that energy, time and emotion into a story with no resolution. That's not to say that her story was not a story worth telling, but when it comes to true crime documentaries a huge part of the fascination with the genre is not just the investigation, but the way in which investigators followed clues to a resolution. When there is no resolution I feel affected by the documentarian's personal bias, we ultimately get fed a story which can be Terri picked in a way to fit whatever narrative the documentarian is pushing, like in this case one gets the impression that the suspect is most likely the killer, when in reality there are many other alternate theories none of them more credible than the other so in documentaries like these I feel somewhat misled. It's when there is a resolution that we are able to be shown the facts that led them to its inevitable conclusion.