The show did play a profound role in getting Syed a retrial, scheduled for 2018 but since delayed. (A self-referential second season debuted in October.) And the first season of Sarah Koenig’s Serial, which clearly aimed to exonerate Adnan Syed in the 1999 killing of his Baltimore high school ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, spun a thoughtful tale but ended in a fog of confusion: “I nurse doubt,” Koenig concluded wanly. Making a Murderer took a great deal of fire for stacking the deck and inflating its own importance at its human subjects’ expense. This approach, to put it mildly, comes with its own set of problems.
KYLE VAN RIPER SWING IT SERIAL
The true-crime tales that have gone truly viral in this decade, from the blockbuster 2014 debut of the Serial podcast to Netflix’s own 2015 phenomenon Making a Murderer, are presented as mysteries, as potential travesties of injustice, as catnip for Reddit sleuths, as elegant campfire tales of prestige ambiguity. That title, by the way, is a quote from the appalled judge in Bundy’s first Florida trial, as relayed in detail in The Ted Bundy Tapes: “The court finds that both of these killings were indeed heinous, atrocious, and cruel, and that they were extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile, and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain, and utter indifference to human life.” This show, to be crystal clear, is not kind of fun. Polygon: “The life story of a mass murderer is. (John Malkovich plays a judge just be grateful Greta Van Fleet are not involved.) Early reviews from Sundance are hesitant but, y’know, titillated.
KYLE VAN RIPER SWING IT FULL
Perversely, Berlinger’s second 2019 Ted Bundy project-a feature film called Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, with Zac Efron in the starring role-shook up the internet Friday with a campy trailer full of cock-rock riffs and stunt casting and a great deal of implied chin saliva. This show humbly aims to remind us that pure evil sometimes wears a pretty face, or as Bundy himself puts it, “People don’t realize that murderers do not come out in the dark with long teeth and saliva dripping off their chin.” Ted Bundy was, we are constantly reminded, a handsome and awkwardly charming guy who also happened to be “a piece of garbage in the shape of a human being,” in the words of prosecutor George Dekle, who got Bundy convicted for the abduction and murder of a 12-year-old girl. But even under the direction of Joe Berlinger-an enormously respected documentarian thanks to his Paradise Lost trilogy with Bruce Sinofsky-it doesn’t have much to offer beyond titillation and revulsion, horror-movie prurience dressed up in true-crime pompousness. Which does not make The Ted Bundy Tapes worthless, exactly. Which is how he came to record more than 100 hours of audio of Bundy being an evasive, soliloquizing blowhard.
And the journalist, a young and green Michaud plucked more or less at random, figured he’d get a hell of a story either way. Bundy, ever the deluded narcissist, figured he’d somehow prove his innocence. On death row, he agreed to speak extensively with a journalist in exchange for his cases being reopened. The full scale is unknown, but Bundy’s murder spree likely started in Washington state in the mid-’70s, spread to Utah and Colorado (and possibly California and Idaho), and culminated in Florida, where he was apprehended for the third time and sentenced to death in two separate murder trials. Unfortunately, Michaud’s the guy with the tapes. “It’s a point of pride with me that I can’t.” “If you can do that, I’m-more power to you.” He laughs. “To understand how he thought, you have to be able to project yourself into a sociopath’s brain,” journalist and author Stephen Michaud tells us near the show’s midpoint.
Nor will The Ted Bundy Tapes offer much in the way of insight. “The truth is terrible, terrible,” a talking-head prosecutor intones late in the game, shortly after an FBI agent has described Bundy as “the Jack the Ripper of the United States.” No, to the show’s detriment, there is nothing much to do here but wallow, and wince, and withstand. It is 90 seconds into Netflix’s four-part Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which premiered on Thursday and is certainly not, to its credit, trying to trick you with a cutesy tone or a galaxy-brained alternate theory as to who killed all those women.
“Beaten and strangled.” “Abduction, nude body.” “We found the parts of four skulls.” “Bludgeoned, raped.” “Sexually mutilated, by mouth, by teeth.” Which requires, of course, spending four hours with his victims, 30-odd young women (that is an estimate) whose photos-all school-yearbook glamour shots in funereal black and white-flit across the screen as a tangle of grim voices intone the grimmest possible words. So you’ve decided to spend four hours with Ted Bundy.
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