Also: “Penitentiary walls stop nothing.” An unnecessary love triangle emerges. “Your son is bone-deep in that ragged tribe,” Spencer proclaims. An adaptation of the novel (originally titled Are You Sleeping) by Kathleen Barber, its scripts are cluttered with lines that might’ve looked all right on the page but sound unwieldy when spoken aloud. Sadly, Truth Be Told doesn’t seem to have much to say on their plight that superior predecessors including Netflix’s hilariously sophomoric true-crime mockumentary American Vandal haven’t already covered. The cast does the best it can with thin characters Elizabeth Perkins brings engaging pathos to Warren’s cancer-stricken mom Melanie.

(Nothing in the four episodes sent to critics gave me as much pleasure as the realization that Josie is basically a Lizzy Caplan character impersonating an Emily Blunt character.) It’s in scenes centered around the Buhrmanns and the Caves, which illustrate how the media can warp the families whose tragedies it distills into entertainment, that the show finds some resonance. The dilemma is cumbersome enough to come across as a contrived-for-TV thought experiment more than a smart inquiry into real ideas about race and ethics.Īnd it cements that impression before Lanie’s twin sister Josie pops up in New York with blonde hair, a fake English accent and a new name. Truth Be Told wants us to ponder whether a black journalist is morally obligated to help a Nazi whom she believes was wrongfully convicted, even if his incarceration is partly her fault. The surprise is that his arms are covered in white supremacist tattoos at some point during his two decades in prison he joined the Aryan Brotherhood. It stands to reason that when Poppy shows up at San Quentin, Warren isn’t exactly overjoyed to see her. It’s like Serial, in other words, if Koenig had helped put Adnan Syed behind bars in the first place. But 19 years later, new evidence that a witness, Chuck’s then-teenage daughter Lanie (Lizzy Caplan), was coached compels Poppy to retrace her steps-in a revelatory first-person podcast, naturally. Her reporting proved instrumental in the conviction of the victim’s 17-year-old neighbor, Warren Cave (played as an adult by Aaron Paul). Octavia Spencer stars as Poppy Parnell, a Bay Area journalist who made her name covering the 1999 murder of Stanford professor Chuck Buhrmann. 6, the series features the service’s most impressive cast this side of The Morning Show (with which it shares an executive producer in Reese Witherspoon).

True detective season 1 synopsis