TikTok: Murder Gone Viral

Detective stories can be fascinating: I love '24 Hours in Police Custody' and similar shows, which use contemporary footage to chart police investigations as they happened. 'TikTok: Muder Gone Viral', however, can only reconstruct events after the fact, with tabloid journalists filling in the gaps. The underlying crime is tawdry and ultimately tragic: after the end of a sexual relationship with a striking age gap, the rejected party attempts to extort the other, who then has her friends drive them off the road. The link to TikTok is rather faint: the woman, and her daughter, had both become semi-famous on the social network, but that's all. One can wonder if this fame had gone to their heads, or if it's a certain sort of crazy person who seeks viral fame in the first place; but the programme provides no insight into this. One reason '24 Hours' works is that it often invokes sympathy, for the victims and sometimes even for the criminals; but we don't learn enough about any of the protagonists here to truly understand them.