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Review: ‘Making a Murderer Part 2’: What’s Next for Steven Avery

While watching Netflix’s “Making a Murderer Part 2,” you’re always aware that it exists in the world created by Part 1, the 10-episode series that helped ignite the true-crime-television explosion in 2015. The adage that the documentarian’s camera affects the events it records has never been more self-evidently true.

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By
Mike Hale
, New York Times

While watching Netflix’s “Making a Murderer Part 2,” you’re always aware that it exists in the world created by Part 1, the 10-episode series that helped ignite the true-crime-television explosion in 2015. The adage that the documentarian’s camera affects the events it records has never been more self-evidently true.

Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, who wrote and directed both seasons (Part 2 lands Friday), open the new installment with a news clip montage demonstrating the impact of the original. As they continue the stories of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, both serving life sentences in Wisconsin for a 2005 murder, TV news crews are ever-present, drawn by the notoriety the series has given the men’s cases. When a lawyer says that the men’s hopes are dampened by the “highly politicized” situation, it’s understood that the fallout from the series has contributed to the politicizing.

The attention drawn by “Making a Murderer” even creates its own spoiler problem: Anyone who has followed Avery’s and Dassey’s cases since the first season is likely to know the outcomes of the hearings and appeals that are supposed to provide much of the suspense this time around.

Part 2 still offers its share of the mystery and surprise that made the original so compelling. It’s a very different viewing experience, however.

“Making a Murderer” was a ready-made, a stranger-than-fiction saga that provided foolproof drama while benefiting greatly from Demos and Ricciardi’s meticulous and exhaustive approach. (After serving 18 years in prison for sexual assault and being exonerated by DNA evidence, Avery was arrested and convicted in the murder of Teresa Halbach and imprisoned again, this time for life; his then-teenage nephew was also convicted in Halbach’s murder.)

Part 2 takes place with both men offscreen, their presence limited to prison telephone calls, and the trials and police investigations that filled much of the first season are seen only in flashback snippets. Its movement is incremental and quotidian, reflecting the torturous process of filing appeals and re-examining forensic evidence. That’s another way of saying that it’s slow, especially through the first four or five of its 10 episodes (which stretch across 10 1/2 hours).

It’s also more self-consciously constructed. It has an A plot, in which Avery’s new lawyer, Kathleen Zellner, a specialist in post-conviction exonerations, conducts an exhaustive re-examination of his case. And it has a B plot, in which Dassey’s lawyers try to prove that he was convicted because of a coerced confession. Bridging the two are scenes with the men’s intertwined families that can be repetitive but at their best are powerfully emotional.

Zellner, tough and smart in equal measure, is Part 2’s star. At first the long discussions of ballistics and blood stains she conducts with her cadre of experts can be eye-glazing, but by the fifth episode the investigation kicks into gear. Over the second half of the season, Zellner develops a set of plausible alternative theories and suspects that provide the kind of sensational twists — in theory at least — that drew people into the original.

The season’s identification with the supremely confident Zellner’s point of view is so complete that you may not notice right away how much time she spends sliming people — prosecutors, cops, potential suspects, other lawyers. More problematic, if you care to think about it, is the way in which the show’s focus on detection and questions of criminal justice takes the focus almost entirely away from Halbach, the victim.

Demos and Ricciardi are not great stylists, and “Making a Murderer” often dulls out tonally and visually, locked into an unvarying mood of melancholic Americana — somber guitar music, lights going out in lonely houses at dusk. Someone else might make a spikier, darker show out of this material.

But their method gathers force and pays off over time. They’re especially attuned to Avery’s steadfastly loyal parents, Dolores and Allan, whose declining health and spirits are the emotional core of Part 2 — a wasting away in tragic rhythm with their imprisoned son. It’s a semi-spoiler, for the viewer not aware of Avery’s and Dassey’s current fates, to note that even Zellner has to work to put on a brave face by the end of Part 2. Sadly, both men are young enough that there could easily be a Part 3.

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