Just when you think you can't possibly deal with another big-ticket true-crime documentary series, along comes something else to get you sucked back in. This time it's Showtime's, a five-part series that takes us inside the bloody terror that has for years gripped the small town of Jennings, Louisiana.Advertisement
Well, the terror has gripped those who live on the wrong side of the railway tracks. For those on the good side, with its manicured neighbourhoods full of mock plantation mansions, it's not so much of a thing. Which is why it took the murders of no fewer than seven young women from the poor side – with all its unemployment, crack addiction and desperate nickel-and-dime sex trade - for local police to establish a multi-agency taskforce to investigate the crimes.
Director Matthew Galkin and journalist Ethan Brown compile riveting interviews with those around the murders – some of whom have been accused of certain murders themselves – to paint an ever more disturbing picture.Amazon Prime Video's first foray into original American stand-up comedy specials is on the whole resolutely unadventurous.
Then there's Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley, whose cleverly written, sharply performed bad-mum double-act has a huge potential audience and is undergoing development as a network sitcom. And then there's Alonzo Bodden, who has been on the road for 25 years, who has some interesting observations about race and politics, but who demonstrates via the interminably long, name-dropping first anecdote of his special why he's not half as big as he might have been.
When she shares her response to the tedious old question "You're a feminist – does that mean you hate men?" it's a little lightning bolt that starkly illuminates everything about the assumption. But Wetterlund doesn't get stuck to the flypaper of the personal-confessional; she's soon into a discourse on the weird lameness of modern mainstream country music that's keenly observed and which enables her briefly to use her singing chops to good effect.