Their frank and humanizing testimonials, paired with archival police and news footage from the cases, illustrate the momentous effort that went into cracking some of the most egregious serial homicides in modern memory. There’s no narration or outside talking heads here, just the compelling words of the women and men who worked gruesome crime scenes, pored over hundreds of clues, risked their lives giving chase and suffered emotionally after interrogating sociopaths, sadists and cannibals. Homicide detectives recount in vivid detail the extreme measures they took to track and capture the globe’s most notorious serial killers in Netflix’s docuseries “Catching Killers.” The Green River Killer, Aileen Wuornos, BTK and the Happy Face Killer are among the subjects covered in this two-season, eight-episode collection of captivating stories told by the investigators at the forefront of solving the cases. Paul Scheer, Nicole Byer and Eugene Mirman are among the first-rate voice cast. It’s tonally more reminiscent of “Flight of the Conchords” than to any other buddy cartoon show, including its childish leads, and as on “Flight” there are songs, with a retro emphasis on reggae, jungle drums and bass, old-school hip-hop and, to my ear, early ‘80s British postpunk. Richard Ayoade, a stalwart of British millennial comedy (best known here for “The IT Crowd”), plays Onion, the practical one, and series creator George Gendi, also British, is Apple, the idiot, who share a room atop a skyscraper accessible only by fire escape. (They eat food too, though not food with faces.) Rendered in assertive lines with compass-and-protractor backgrounds, the series is absolutely child-friendly but, like the best cartoons, employs sophisticated language and oddball ideas. Recently terminated by Cartoon Network but now available in its 76-episode entirety on HBO Max (including some installments yet unseen), the brilliant and original “Apple & Onion” is set in a cosmopolitan world - something like New York City - populated by anthropomorphic items of food, from the fresh produce of the title to Burger, Cotton Candy, Falafel and Chicken Nugget, a cop. (Executive assistants know more than anyone else in the newsroom.) Some are commonplaces of the journalism drama that “Inventing Anna” fails to pursue in a satisfying way: Though the final episodes toy with the notion that Kent has grown so close to her subject that she too has been conned, by this point in the series the viewer is too drained to scrutinize the sloppy ethics. Some of its exaggerations fall under the category of “convenient archetype,” like the screaming editor, the recalcitrant writer, the clueless assistant. It’s a fool’s errand to fact-check a confidence game, but “Inventing Anna” plays fast and loose with more aspects of professional journalism that mere staffing. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, eat your hearts out! Under the watchful eye of a jerk editor (Tim Guinee) and the utterly aloof eye of another, more powerful editor (Armand Schultz), the Scriberia quartet manages to produce a many-thousand-word cover story in seven episodes flat. Played by Anna Chlumsky ( “Veep’s” Amy Brookheimer), the series’ Pressler stand-in, pregnant and reeling from professional disgrace, is dogged in the extreme - at one point, she nails down a key source as her water breaks - but it’s her colleagues in “Scriberia” who steal the show, and help her bring home her socialite whale.Īpparently a real place in the New York magazine offices, this corner warren for newsroom curmudgeons (played by Anna Deavere Smith, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry) emerges as the wryly funny dream team behind Kent’s blockbuster scoop - or, if you’re in an uncharitable mood, the magical helpers of a Disney-esque fantasy.
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