I previously was singing the praises of this series because I do think that it is very well-made and while I have no idea if it is accurately told compared to the real-life events, it does hold your attention and really ropes you in, especially in the very early episodes.
However, like most series that exist these days, this one suffers from what I would call "senseless extension" and as the episodes are rolling by I find myself kind of getting upset that they are dragging it out. This happens all too often with series and I know why they do it, but I don't like that this is just the norm with series these days.
Before people tl;dr their way away from this review please note that I do recommend this series but just don't like the middle of it where it seems as though they made something 3 episodes that easily could have been 1.
Since most of the story is in Italian, I do not have the option of leaving it on in the background while I do something else like clean up my house, which is what I would normally do when a series starts to lull.
To recap: This is the true story of a woman falsely accused and convicted of murder in Italy and it tells the story of the miscarriage of justice that the people involved faced throughout the investigation and the trial. It is important to note that
the series is based on a book that Knox herself wrote, so it is possible that there is a bit of bias involved. I am not saying that there definitely IS, but I would imagine if I was writing a book about myself that I might leave out a few parts that make me look bad and it is understandable that Amanda might have done the same.
A couple of things are on display in this series that I think are important not just for people that are wrongfully accused in Italy, but just anywhere in the world. One, the detectives seemed to be extremely interested in getting a conviction and not overly concerned about who was convicted or if they were actually guilty of the crime in question. This is showcased quite a lot throughout the series and the actors and actresses involved do a VERY good job of playing sort of despicable police who are more like a gang than they are organized justice.
I believe that something similar to this exists in my own country of USA and probably many other countries in the world.
The second thing is how the ravenous media were able to frame this in an entertaining way that negatively affected the public impression of Amanda and perhaps influenced the outcome of the trial as well. Like a lot of people, I feel like the media today and for a long time is a business that is only looking out for themselves and not at all interested in actually telling the truth. This is shown a great deal in this series and I think it is very important.
The last major thing that I want to talk about is the innocence and naivete of youth. In the beginning stages Amanda is shown as being confident that because she didn't actually do anything that she has nothing to worry about. She continues to feel this way long into the trial, believing that justice will prevail. Her feelings change dramatically as time goes by and she realizes that her innocent feelings of goodness prevailing in this literal case, are very very wrong. The wonderful actress Grace Van Patten plays this role incredibly and I hope she ends up getting nominated for awards because I feel she deserves them.
Where the series kind of loses me, and perhaps this is why this show has barely a 70% rating on most major review sites, is that it is far longer than it needs to be and we end up going into what I call "side-missions" frequently in order to fill up the time necessary to make this thing 8 episodes long. I don't know if it was decided that it needed to be 8 episodes long before they even finished the script or what, but it certainly feels that way from episodes 3 onward. They do a wonderful job getting you hooked in the first 2 episodes as they seamlessly travel back and forth in time in a very creative way, showing us the before, during, and even some of the after as they go along. Then once episode 3 happens we are at a phase where the pace is frustratingly slow.
I think that there were probably a lot of people that walked away from this one permanently at that point and this was likely made more extreme by the fact that rather than release all the episodes at once, they released them week-by-week.
I like the week-by-week strategy these days but at the same time I really don't like it when showrunners will unnecessarily drag things out and I can only assume it is over several months because Hulu wants to make sure that people don't cancel their memberships. It has the opposite effect on me though, if you drag me through several boring episodes in a row, I tend to forget that the show even exits. I only walked back to it because I couldn't find anything else to watch and now I only have 2 episodes to go. If there was something else that I was really interested in at the time, I likely would have forgotten to return to this after finishing episode 4.
In particular, I think the overall series would be better if they had condensed the courtroom sessions a bit because much of this drags on and on to the point where you are no longer interested. Maybe they had no choice, maybe it was a producer decision that it must be 8 episodes long. It certainly seems that way to me and it wouldn't be the first time that producers made something bad or just not as good by making corporate decisions like this.
I think that if you also start to feel as though the show is really dragging along in episodes 3-5 that you should stick with it though, because there is a good payoff on the other end. This is actually quite common in series to have good "book-ends" to a series while shoving all the crap in the middle.
Carry on though because it is worth it in the end. If for no other reason than the fact that almost any other series is a load of crap right now anyway.