Netflix, like with every other genre it seems, has gone full throttle into the true crime genre. This year alone we’ve been hit with like five zeitgeist busting docuseries from the network. The most recent in this is Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist, a true crime story that starts off simple and becomes an intense, twisty, barn burner of a television series.
As Netflix describes the series, at 2:28 PM on August 28, 2003, a man walks into a bank with a bomb locked around his neck. After he is handcuffed outside the bank, the police sit and watch, unsure of what to do, but by the time the bomb squad has arrived on the scene, it’s too late, the bomb has gone off and killed the man. All of this is caught live on camera and begins the story that reaches far past just a simple robbery or victim case and brings us into the orbit of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. To talk about the plot of this docuseries any more would do it a disservice but you asbolutely aren’t ready for where this will go.
What is perhaps most thrilling about Evil Genius is the commitment to economical storytelling. As engrossing as Wild Wild Country was and as emotionally charged as The Keepers was, Netflix has a length of episodes problems when it comes to these documentaries. Audiences have been trained since birth to watch things in half hour and hour incriments, so if your series is going to over that, the editing and subject matter better be sharp. Most of the time it’s not. I appreciated that no episode in Evil Genius went over 55 minutes, not only for allowing me to not meld with my couch, but because the filmmakers were forced to make strong choices, present their ideas, and leave just enough time for it to linger. Even as the series is presenting its thesis on events, it left enough wiggle room for the audience to form their own opinion, without needing to “both sides” this thing like Wild Wild Country did.
By doing this, you get a better sense of the characters. Marjorie is as fascinating a person as Robert Durst, but even she needs to be given context within a narrative. Though I had a particular issue with showing the actual camera footage of the bomb going off, every other rough detail really helped shape the series into one of the most interesting watches of the year.