From “The Human Cost of Binge-Watching True Crime Series,” by Melissa Chan, TIME, April 24, 2020:
… When Netflix asked [Robert] Mast’s family and friends in February 2019 to participate in the series, I Am A Killer, those closest to him pleaded with the producers to abandon the project, saying it was inhumane to sell a documentary at the emotional expense of a grieving family. “As a parent, a fellow human being, I beg you not to do this,” Pendleton wrote in the first of many emails to the producers, which she shared with TIME. “PLEASE don’t do this!”
But on Jan. 31, Netflix released the second season of the show to more than 60 million U.S. subscribers, leading it with the episode detailing Mast’s murder. In the first few minutes, viewers are introduced to Lindsay Haugen, the woman who pleaded guilty to murdering Mast. From a Montana prison, where she’s serving a 60-year sentence, the occasionally tearful Haugen recounts her years in an abusive relationship before she met and fell hard for Mast in August 2015. Twenty-six days later, he was dead.
Far from portraying Haugen as a vicious killer, the episode casts her in a relatively sympathetic light, and at a time when police chiefs, politicians and the media often are refusing to name mass killers to deny them fame, I Am a Killer takes the opposite tact. In her confession to police, Haugen casts herself as having acted out of a deep love for Mast, saying she put him in a chokehold and held her hand over his nose and mouth after he insisted he wanted to die. But in the same interview, which was recorded by police and is included in the episode, she flippantly tells a detective that she also wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone with her bare hands. Police say Mast was so drunk that he was unable to fight back. By the end of February, I Am a Killer had landed on Netflix’s list of its “Top 10” most-watched shows of the day in America, positioning it to be renewed for a third season.
“When we continue to give numbers to these shows, they keep making them,” says Mast’s stepsister, Jenna Wimmer, who along with Mast’s father, brother, friends and other siblings refused to take part in the series. “And real people living real lives keep getting re-traumatized every time.” …
The show’s producers told Pendleton they were making the series to “encourage social discourse” about issues related to violent crime—not to sensationalize brutal acts or advocate for convicted criminals—but she didn’t buy it. “I really don’t feel that with the name I Am a Killer, you will be viewed by an audience wanting to seek social change and understand violence crime,” she wrote to them. “They are just looking for gruesome details of murders.” …
Read the whole thing HERE.