Nearly three years after the true crime docuseries Making a Murderer premiered on Netflix, its subjects Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey are still behind bars, serving life sentences for the murder of Teresa Halbach. But even though Avery and Dassey are right where we left them at the end of season one, a new 10-episode season of the show — billed as full of additional details and follow-up reporting — launches on Netflix today.
Could there be new twists? Is there another suspect? What exactly is Making a Murderer going to tell its biggest fans that they don’t already know?
It’s impossible to summarize every detail of the Avery-Dassey-Halbach murder case in a single paragraph; Making a Murderer’s first season spent 10 hour-long episodes digging into the case, and was still criticized for what it left out. But the most important thing to remember is that season one posited the idea that Avery and Dassey were framed by a crooked police force that planted DNA and coerced a confession. And though there have been appeals (in June, the Supreme Court decided not to hear Dassey’s case), the two are still convicted of Halbach’s murder and serving out their respective sentences.
That said, it’s easy to see why Netflix wanted to make a second season, considering how immensely popular the first one was.
But this one feels more like dramatized entertainment and less like a genuine, trustworthy investigation into a real-life murder case. There’s one scene in particular that is so weird it becomes hilarious, but at the same time dark and sad. The effect is unnerving, albeit probably not in the way the show intended. Season two feels as if Making a Murderer’s creators were more spectacle-driven than concerned with making a statement about the criminal justice system. Here are five things to know.
1) Kathleen Zellner becomes Making a Murderer’s protagonist
In season one, Making a Murderer had a lot more to explain. The public didn’t know who Steven Avery, Brendan Dassey, or Teresa Halbach were, nor were they familiar with the politics of Manitowoc County or how many people in the community are intertwined. Making a Murderer’s first season laid this foundation, and I think a large part of what made that first season so compelling was that the show let its audience form their own judgments about Avery, Dassey, and the people who hold power in this pocket of Wisconsin while slowly introducing new information that could alter those judgments.
Season two doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting of explaining all of Making a Murderer’s main players and their relationships with one another. But the drawback is that without a bunch of backstory and history to convey, the show clearly has a lot of time to kill. Perhaps that’s why the series seems to have evolved from a story about whether Avery and Dassey are innocent, or from a critique of the US justice system, into a show about Avery’s lawyer trying to dismantle the state of Wisconsin’s case against her client.
That lawyer is Kathleen Zellner, a being who’s equal parts of deadpan and steely earnestness and seems like she was created in a lab specifically for Cecily Strong to play her in a future episode of Saturday Night Live. Zellner, as Making a Murderer is quick to emphasize, specializes in wrongful convictions — which makes it feel like she’s just the person Avery needs in his corner. The first few episodes of season two take on the air of a documentary that is specifically about how Zellner intends to fight the state.
2) Season two focuses on Zellner building her case —and maybe proving the show’s season one thesis
Throughout the first season, Making a Murderer certainly contained moments of objectivity, and its central premise clearly professed to be about questioning the legal system. But it was easy to argue — as many people ultimately did — that in the end and perhaps all along, it was in favor of Avery and Dassey.
Some observers suggested creators Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi were biased and really just wanted to show that Avery and Dassey were framed. A key detail of this argument was that Making a Murderer completely omitted a crucial piece of evidence from its season one narrative: that Avery’s sweat was found beneath the hood latch of Halbach’s car. Ken Kratz, who was the prosecutor in the case, said that the show, in its omission of sweat DNA evidence, “really presents misinformation” to its audience.
The criticism about why the show failed to address the sweat DNA was a valid one. Not addressing it seemed strange in that the show paid so much attention to detail regarding other forms of DNA evidence — for example, season one specifically discussed how Halbach’s DNA was not found in Avery’s garage, despite the alleged presence of a bullet with Halbach’s DNA that prosecutors say was found in the garage and suggests he shot her there. There were also discussions of Avery’s DNA being found on Halbach’s keys, even though Halbach’s DNA was not found on said keys.
Because the docuseries did not discuss the sweat DNA found on the hood latch, the omission could be viewed as deliberate, with the intention of skewing viewers’ judgment.
Season two’s second episode specifically tackles this criticism.
Through Zellner, the show rehashes some of the theories raised by season one that Avery’s DNA was planted on Halbach’s keys by law enforcement, and that the planted blood was acquired from old samples. She walks through a scenario of how authorities could have planted Avery’s sweat DNA under the hood of Halbach’s vehicle and then coerced Dassey to confess that Avery reached his hand under the hood latch, thereby securing their crooked plan.
It’s a compelling and fascinating idea, but it puts viewers in the odd position of having to weigh how much of what Zellner is saying counts as a lawyer presenting the facts of a solid case, versus how much the series benefits from making Zellner seem competent and trustworthy. It is, after all, in Making a Murderer’s interest to have Zellner shoot down Kratz’s criticism about omitting a key piece of evidence, since it makes it seem like the show was justified in omitting it.
But Making a Murderer doesn’t do much to show us that it’s analyzing Zellner’s theories thoroughly and objectively. It doesn’t make any effort to challenge what she’s saying by, say, cross-referencing Zellner’s multiple claims about DNA evidence and what might have happened in the case with the opinions of independent experts and scientists.
It feels as if the show is less concerned with highlighting systemic issues in the criminal justice system than with proving Avery’s innocence and responding to conspiracy theories. The show allows Zellner to be a dominant, definitive voice even though it would’ve boosted Making a Murderer’s credibility, if the show still wants to tell an objective story, to thoroughly vet and scrutinize what Zellner is saying.
3) The show wants you to know that you were part of its season one success
Not much has changed with Dassey or Avery since the end of Making a Murderer season one — they’re both still in jail serving life sentences. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has changed with the show itself, and the early episodes of season two make sure to let you know that. In the season premiere, in what is both a poignant and indulgent six or so minutes, the show underlines how much people loved season one and all the attention it got from the media. It also, perhaps too gleefully, shows how fans of the show went online to completely trash the Yelp page for Kratz’s law firm.
Seeing the visceral response to Making a Murderer’s first season compressed into season two’s opening segment is slightly nostalgic, and it will make many viewers question why it was this show specifically that seemed to best harness the potential of the true crime genre.
Was it because people wanted justice for a possibly innocent man? Was it because the show made it easy to identify bad guys and good guys? Was it because viewers saw how seemingly simple it would be to frame someone for murder if had you enough expertise and resources? Was it because it’s blazingly easy for just about anyone to play detective on the internet?
Making a Murderer season two unfortunately isn’t particularly concerned with those answers, or with examining what it is about Avery and Dassey’s case that hit a national nerve. The show doesn’t want to explain why it became a phenomenon, just to remind you that it was one.
4) There’s a really weird and messed-up scene with a mannequin
Of everything that happens in season two’s early episodes, what stands out most is a strange, Mythbusters-esque sequence in episode one that had me shaking my head and wondering if I was watching an episode of The Office.
In an attempt to recreate blood splatter patterns that were found and recorded in Halbach’s SUV during the initial investigation into Halbach’s death, Zellner and a cohort find a mannequin that is approximately the same height as Halbach, and tie 135 pounds of weight to it so that it weighs approximately the same. They then splatter fake blood in its hair and try throwing it into the same model of SUV that Halbach drove, at many different angles.
Each time they try, with a thump of the mannequin plastic hitting the car interior, they fail to recreate the splatter pattern. So they resort to whipping the mannequin’s head, and the blood in its hair, onto a white piece of paper like Jackson Pollock flinging paint at a canvas. The whole sequence plays like a dark comedy, something propped up at the intersection of macabre, silly, and hilarious. All that’s missing is Zellner deadpanning to the camera with a shrug.
There are a few more instances in season two where Zellner attempts to reenact certain aspects of Halbach’s killing — including shooting an animal skull to prove that bone fragments shoud’ve been found in Avery’s garage, retracing Teresa Halbach’s last steps before her death, and breaking into Avery’s trailer.
And it all made me question how serious season two wants to be.
5) The Halbach family is still not cooperating with the show
Just as they did in season one, members of Teresa Halbach’s immediate family opted not to participate in the Making a Murderer season two episodes screened for press. A list of their names appears on a title card that lists people who were contacted by the show but chose not to appear on it.
Prior to the show’s release in 2015, Halbach’s family had issued a statement saying that they viewed the show as crass entertainment based on Halbach’s death:
Having just passed the 10-year anniversary of the death of our daughter and sister, Teresa, we are saddened to learn that individuals and corporations continue to create entertainment and to seek profit from our loss. We continue to hope that the story of Teresa’s life brings goodness to the world.
The continued absence of the Halbachs and their feelings in season two shades the way viewers think not only about Making a Murderer but also about who does participate on behalf of the Halbachs. It’s particularly icky listening to Halbach’s college friend provide season two’s voiceovers defending the Halbach family— the thought being that if Halbach’s immediate family didn’t want to appear on the show, how much of a “friend” could this person really be?
In concert with season two’s gory mannequin blood splatter reenactment and responses to viewer conspiracy theories, it really makes you think about the Halbach family’s 2015 statement regarding the show being more entertainment than a thorough investigation. Making a Murderer unfortunately feels more like the former than the latter.