Anyone who has so much as turned on a television this year can tell you there is too much true crime. The genre has reached a saturation point: the stories are becoming thinner and are being repeated in different forms until they feel threadbare. A category that’s broad enough to include everything from “In Cold Blood” to “My Favorite Murder” also runs the gamut from respectful to exploitative, with more than a few recent series falling on the wrong side of the line. “Black Bird,” a finely crafted, incredibly well-acted, utterly fresh Apple TV+ limited series, is not one of them. In fact, it’s a show so outstanding, that it makes one wonder: do we actually have too much true crime, or just not enough true crime made by Dennis Lehane?
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The author of modern classics like “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island” only writes for TV occasionally, and maybe that’s a good thing after all, because a show as impressive as “Black Bird” takes time to digest. The six-episode series, which Lehane developed based on James Keene’s book “In With The Devil,” is both hypnotically compelling and clear-eyed in its execution. It carries shades of Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and David Simon, but it also has a distinctive voice all its own. It is, quite simply, high-quality TV storytelling.
The show follows Jimmy Keene, played by Taron Egerton, in a complex and wrenching performance that deserves a fast pass to award season consideration. Initially, Jimmy is a cocky guy, a cop’s kid, and a ladies’ man who enters the prison system on gun charges with the disposition of a man who’s always been able to charm himself out of trouble. But when his father, played by the late Ray Liotta in his final role, has a stroke, Jimmy decides to take an unorthodox route to shorten his sentence.
Meanwhile, a man named Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser) has just confessed to being a serial killer, but the deeply eccentric, mentally disorganized outcast has a reputation for “serial confessing” that’s kept him from seeing any jail time in the past. To make matters worse, his brother and other community members insist he’s just an impressionable oddball who’s been coerced into a false confession. To make his conviction stick, investigators on his case (Sepideh Moafi and Greg Kinnear) come up with a risky gambit to kill two birds with one stone. They train Jimmy on Larry’s case, then transfer him to the high-security prison for dangerous and unstable inmates where Larry is staying, offering a commuted sentence in exchange for the supposed killer’s irrevocable confession.
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This is a plot that could easily fall prey to tired crime movie cliches, but in the hands of Lehane and a talented slate of directors, including Michaël R. Roskam, Joe Chapelle, and Jim McKay, every scene feels like a surprise. The series has many strengths, but one of its greatest is the sense of stewardship Lehane clearly feels for this story. As details about the crimes in question – the rapes and murders of young girls – come to light, the show always chooses humanity over horror. Its most gruesome details are delivered with rare sensitivity: typed on-screen, alluded to in silence, or happening offscreen entirely. “Black Bird” doesn’t have a lurid bone in its body, instead choosing to chip away steadily to unearth its characters’ central, painful truths.
Hauser is fantastic as Larry, played here as a deeply creepy figure who is nonetheless rendered incredibly human. He’s a bundle of strange compulsions and interests, a janitor and former gravedigger who veers wildly between sweet geekiness, bug-eyed menace, and near-incoherence. Among other things, “Black Bird” asks audiences to confront the myths we’ve made about men who are monsters. As Larry and Jimmy’s conversations deepen, skirting the edges of confession and delving into increasingly unnerving topics all the while, the series paints a picture of two parallel yet utterly different childhoods. The show doesn’t ask viewers to empathize with its criminals, but just to understand how they happened. Impressionistic flashback scenes appear unobtrusively throughout “Black Bird,” quietly enriching each character’s point of view.
“Black Bird” isn’t just a character study: it also features a surprising amount of twists and turns for a story that takes place almost entirely within the walls of a prison. Jimmy, smart and resourceful and likable despite himself, has to ingratiate himself with Larry while also dealing with the ever-present danger of being outed as a snitch. Egerton is phenomenal as a man whose freedom and safety depend on his ability to seem effortless and collected at all times. The show is laced through with riveting slow-burn scenes of conversation between the two inmates, and in some, you can see his eyes well up almost imperceptibly before he fights the tears with a perfect fake smile.
Polished and engrossing, Lehane’s adaptation also excels thanks to the perfectly picked cast. While Egerton and Hauser will surely dominate conversations about the series thanks to their work in the show’s tough two-hander scenes, Kinnear, Moafi, and Liotta also deserve generous praise. The plot is a pressure cooker, but Jimmy has to move with deliberate ease. Everyone around him isn’t quite as restricted, and often, the unexpressed anguish shows up on the faces of the people who have to bear witness to Jimmy and Larry’s realities from outside the prison bars. The show weaves so much meaning into each moment that no role feels minor: supporting actors including Robyn Malcolm, Jake McLaughlin, and Laney Stiebing also put in noteworthy work as Jimmy’s step-mom, Larry’s brother, and a young murder victim, respectively.
“Black Bird” is the type of expertly built, thoughtfully crafted drama that makes its seams invisible, so that it’s nearly impossible to point to any one section of the six-hour story and declare it the reason the show is so good. It feels singular moment to moment, yes, but it also has an impressively strong overall impact. In the end, it does something remarkably simple, something that true crime stories too often fail to do in their attempts to go bigger or broader than what came before. “Black Bird” tells a great story, and tells it well. [A]