It seems people really love terrible murders.

…

What to know about the Watts Family Murders before the Netflix documentary is released.

I was not familiar with the case of Shanann Watts, her husband Chris, and their two children before seeing Jenny Popplewell’s documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door. To Popplewell’s immense credit, she is never exploitative about the case, instead using it as a way to frame how our online lives contrast against our private struggles, and how what may seem like the perfect family online is a thin veil for a tragic home life. With the word “Murder” in the title, the documentary isn’t really concerned with “whodunnit” or following various clues and threads. The grisly …

Netflix has released a trailer for their upcoming documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door. Directed by Jenny Popplewell, the film pieces together the disappearance of Shanann Watts and her two young daughters, who went missing in Frederick, Colorado in 2018. True Crime documentaries always have a tricky line to walk. They can verge on the exploitative, but they also appeal for our need for justice. As we put more of our lives online, there’s more data for these documentaries to draw from, and American Murder uses social media, law enforcement recordings, text messages, and home videos to tell …