“Black, White & Gray,” in which a documentary filmmaker attempts to piece together a series of murders from 2020, unfolds with all the stylistic elements of the true-crime genre: atmospheric lighting, grainy CCTV footage, and heated interviews with talking heads. At the end of episode one, however, the director reveals the ace up his sleeve. He has tracked down the accused, who has been missing for the past two years, and secured an interview with him. There could hardly be a more gripping cliffhanger, and yet over six episodes, an even bigger surprise is in store. None of this is real.
The drama half of the Hindi-language SonyLIV show, in which the actors engage in dramatic recreations of the crimes, is staged, of course, but so are the interviews with the case’s investigating officer, the victim’s best friend, and the accused’s parents. They are all actors, too. There is no documentary. By adopting the tone and style of true crime, series creator Puskhar Mahabal emphasizes how effective well-packaged narratives can be in convincing viewers of a viewpoint, true or not. “Black, White & Gray” joins American documentaries “Zodiac Killer Project” and “Predators” this year in deconstructing and critically re-evaluating the genre, pointing to ethical lapses not only in how these shows are produced but also in how they are consumed.
In “Zodiac Killer Project,” director Charlie Shackleton walks viewers through what his documentary on America’s infamous Zodiac Killer would have been like if it had actually come to fruition. He employs a wide variety of clips from true-crime shows as references, which, ironically, reinforce how formulaic the genre has become. Likewise, in “Predators,” director David Osit uses a slew of clips from the NBC series “To Catch A Predator,” which features pedophiles being caught in sting operations, but gradually points to everything the show leaves out. All the footage left on the cutting-room floor reveals the series’s dubious legal methods and unbalanced narratives. Like “Black, White & Gray” and “Zodiac Killer Project,” it digs into how the purported lofty aims of true-crime shows, which claim to be in service of the greater good or helping victims’ families find closure, are often used to justify their exploitative techniques.
Both Shackleton’s and Osit’s projects are tied to unanswered questions. Osit’s are personal. His experiences with child abuse and predation put him on a lifelong quest to understand the why behind such behavior. Shackleton’s are professional. He intended to make a documentary based on highway patrol cop Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge,” and was in the process of scouting locations and honing in on interviewees when talks to secure the book rights fell through. This “what if?” led to “Zodiac Killer Project,” in which he juxtaposes sedate landscapes with an urgent narration of the action that would have occurred in his documentary, exposing the artifice of a medium billed as factual.
The director playfully pokes fun at the tropes that recur in Netflix true-crime shows such as “The Jinx,” “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” and “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer,” beginning with the audio-visual elements that appear across their intros. Who knew that birds taking flight, a shadowy man walking away, and inflected country music were such staples of the streamer’s house style? These tropes are well-worn, yet they are precisely what make “Black, White & Gray” so compelling. Their familiarity renders this piece of fiction nearly indistinguishable from reality. According to Mahabal, some viewers still have not figured it out. The show cuts back and forth between grainy footage of talking heads piecing together the crime and a dramatic recreation of its events, complete with creative license. A bloody handprint on a car door is precisely the kind of image one can easily imagine Shackleton chuckling at. In one scene, the chief investigating officer describes the locality where the murders occurred as having a crime ratio of “absolutely zero” before, inadvertently mirroring one of Shackleton’s targets: the stock talking heads in every true-crime documentary who describe their neighborhood as “perfectly peaceful” before it was struck by violent crime.
If “Zodiac Killer Project” calls out Netflix’s true-crime shows for using a talky audio intro to summarize the case when viewers are distracted by their phones, “Black, White & Gray” permits no such unfocused viewing. As its central investigation proceeds, viewers find themselves cast as investigators too, trying to decipher what is real. Mahabal never outright reveals that this is fiction staged realistically. Comprehension dawns gradually on alert watchers. For a series so reliant on tropes, it is remarkably inventive in form.
“Predators,” on the other hand, explores how “To Catch A Predator” relied on packaging incredibly disturbing subject matter, such as men arriving at a house to meet the minors they have been talking to online, only to be ambushed by Chris Hansen and the police, into easy-to-consume entertainment. The show’s popularity in the mid-2000s turned it into a cultural punchline. Jimmy Kimmel once described it as “the funniest thing on television, Punk’d, but for pedophiles.” On the show, the lines between law enforcement and entertainment blur. Dateline producers dictate areas of interrogation, and the cops wear body cameras to secure an action-packed shot. If Mahabal tricks viewers, Chris Hansen, a copycat, and modern predator hunter Skeeter Jean eschew journalistic ethics by attempting to fool YouTube algorithms. Because predator-catch videos without police get taken down, he has a friend pretend to be an officer and later adds flashing cop lights.
Just as “Black, White & Gray” deconstructs the true-crime genre only to weaponize our fixation with it, Shackleton calls out true-crime tropes only to admit to all the ways he would have employed them had he gotten to make his original documentary. You can stealthily manipulate people, he explains, through strategic shots that lead them to believe they are hearing from an authority figure when it is actually just an actor hired to sound like one. “You can’t see it, can you?” he teases in another scene while describing “evocative B-roll,” or brief stock shots meant to conjure up a scene without showing much. It is a testament to our true-crime-dominated culture that such techniques work so effectively.
While “Predators” mulls over why “To Catch A Predator” was never able to answer its central question, namely why these men did what they did, Shackleton argues that true-crime documentaries rarely spark real questions at all. Their scenes are staged to confirm certain suspicions, and any action, no matter how innocuous, can be assigned a sinister intent. Even if the answers do not hold up to rational scrutiny, they evoke a mood so powerful that audiences buy into it. “Black, White & Gray” similarly challenges the truth of true crime, demonstrating that it does not matter whether something is factual; only that viewers believe it is. The police and the media push the narrative that a 22-year-old man committed these murders. Only one news channel questions the ease with which the public accepts this framing. When the filmmaker finds the accused, his narration begins to drive the documentary. He offers alternate explanations for each murder, and gradually, the agendas of each talking head are exposed.
By bravely facing accusations of whitewashing the accused’s actions by presenting his side of the story, the filmmaker in “Black, White & Gray” does in fiction what “To Catch A Predator” could never do in reality. If the show had depicted predatory men as human beings, Osit explains, it would have collapsed. As an editor himself, he likens the NBC series to being cut like a comedy, while the raw, unaired footage of the men in police interrogation rooms is more akin to slow cinema. “You are watching unedited footage, the progression that can sometimes take over an hour, of someone realizing this is the worst day of their life,” he said in an interview. If Shackleton acknowledges that his documentary would have made assumptions about a cypher-like accused for dramatic purposes, “To Catch A Predator” takes real men and erases their humanity altogether.
Both “Predators” and “Zodiac Killer Project” highlight how viewers can be persuaded that all kinds of ethical violations are acceptable as long as they appear to support the best interests of the case. The decoys in “To Catch A Predator,” baby-faced young adults tasked with talking to predatory men online and luring them to the sting house, still grapple with the psychological fallout years later.
These three documentaries avoid a cathartic conclusion, refusing the easy comfort of a binge-worthy true-crime show. Shackleton outlines the montage that would have wrapped up his thwarted project. Since the Zodiac Killer was never caught, there is no resolution, only a trite realization that the world is not always straightforward. “Black, White & Gray” borrows a trick from the true-crime series “The Jinx,” in which the prime suspect confesses to himself in a bathroom without realizing his microphone is still on. In this show, the accused goes to retrieve a hoodie after the camera crew leaves, unaware he is still being filmed. The victim’s distinctive top falls off his shelf. Did he murder her after all? Did he keep her clothing as a trophy? How much of his narrative has been a lie? Some questions can never be resolved. This ambiguity is most wrenching in Osit’s case. The final third of “Predators” features a sit-down interview with Hansen himself. For all Hansen’s insistence that his show was made exactly for people like Osit, who so desperately sought an answer in the hope of making sense of a devastating experience, the director is still no closer to finding one, even now.
So what do you think? Have you seen either “Predators,” “Zodiac Killer Project” or “Black, White & Gray” yet? If so, what did you think of them and do you believe either of them will be nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account, click here here for the most recent tally of awards season winners, here for Next Best Picture’s precursor tracker, and here for their current Oscar predictions.
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