The crime
Fraud, even though Stéphane Bourgoin’s self-portrayal as an expert on serial killers was not considered a criminal offense.

The story
NatGeos Killer Lies: On the hunt for a true criminal con artist has a lot to recommend. National Geographic’s true crime content tends to be direct and competent, and Killer lies is no different. Directed by Ben Selkow (Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown And Human traffickingamong others); it has access to case figures and knowledgeable commentators, including Bourgoin himself and our esteemed colleague Sarah Weinman; and it is based on a meta-banger of an April 2022 longread, Lauren Collins’ Bourgoin Deep Dive for The New Yorker“Murder is his profession.”

Collins is a talking head “Plus” in Killer liesa three-part series that premieres in full tonight on NatGeo’s broadcast channel and will be available on Hulu shortly thereafter. The documentary series faithfully captures what I consider to be the atmosphere of the New Yorkers piece and others like it, carefully researched and ethically presented, but not above a few curses and sidelong glances. The question is whether you need an AV version if the original mag joint is so good, and Killer lies is not absolutely necessary, but it Is It’s worth your time for several reasons.

Let’s start with this straightforward competence. It’s not exactly unusual in this genre, but at the same time the streaming landscape is absolutely full of B/B-plus three-parters, series that should have been produced as 112-minute films, but are solid enough Visuals and do not contain offensive Amount of filler. The measure is often whether it has enough pace to prevent you from jumping out of the boat and into a wikihole; Killer lies faces an additional level of difficulty because the “original” is a well-known and respected entity that the entire true crime commentary world was discussing two years ago – and which can be read in a fraction of the documentary’s running time.

I cannot speak for “civilians”, but for me, Killer lies was so well structured that I didn’t read Collins’ article again until I had finished the document. It describes Bourgoin’s beginnings in researching true crime and serial killers, his rise to become a “titan of the true crime industry” and the work of the online collective 4ème. Oil (Fourth Eye) to confirm their suspicions about Bourgoin and then expose him as a plagiarist and charlatan with his testimonies. This works both on those who do not know the story and on those who only vaguely remember it.

It also works for those who remember it better because it complements Murder, He Wrote by attempting to grapple with the “industry” of which Bourgoin became a “titan.” The damage to the credibility of those who consulted Bourgoin or uncritically wrote up his accomplishments—and, by extension, the damage to profiling’s already somewhat battered reputation. The way Bourgoin’s (largely unrepentant) assumption of a victim role not only revictimized real survivors and their families, but also calls into question the entire true-crime entertainment complex, raising the question of whether narrative and informational benefits outweigh profiting off the suffering of others.

Even the citizen investigations that had a salutary effect in the Fourth Eye case, while they had a positive effect in preventing Bourgoin from continuing to position himself as the French John Douglas, often proved damaging to the investigators themselves in ways that reminded me of I will disappear into the darkness and the price Michelle McNamara paid to solve the Golden State mystery? True Crime Is an industry, and like every industry it has known and hidden costs.

Killer lies doesn’t definitively grapple with this idea, which probably should have had its own episode – or, let’s be honest, its own 12-part episode – but it takes more time with the idea than most docuseries, which often hint at these conflicts but then despair of getting a handle on them and quickly move on. And I understand that strategy one hundred percent, but it Is nice to see a doctor literally tying a rope around his waist and jumping into the quicksand to see what can be done.

As I said, it is not an A+ because it is too long and does some structurally cliched things. (Not to make a scapegoat Killer lies for the shit every documentary series does, most of it far more egregious, but I would really like a 12-24 month moratorium on the reveal sequence “Interviewee’s chair, empty, in the foreground; ‘gotcha’ interviewee moves in the background of the shot, out of focus.” “What about the scene where we come back from the break and the interviewee is obscured by the clapperboard –” No, that has to go too.)

But it’s also a near-ideal adaptation of a longer magazine article: faithful enough to recreate the experience in a visual medium, while adding more research or commentary on the broader issues. Check it out this long weekend.

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