TV documentary at its best: Making a Murderer

The Ricciardi and Demos Network series Making a Murderer is about as good as it gets - once you start you can't stop watching and, though I never binge watch (I prefer to put at least a day between episodes to absorb the material and not to OD and grow sick of a series I'm really enjoying) I'm sure tempted to move ahead. This 10-part series (I'm half-way through and trying hard to avoid stories and posts about this show until we've finished) is a documentary account of a murder case that has so many odd events - either incredible coincidences or some of the most nefarious examples ever of police conspiracy and malfeasance ever recorded; and thanks to great archiving and smart use of contemporary interviews there's plenty of footage so that we experience these events from the inside, live, as they're unfolding - each episode crashing down on us with a new wave of nearly unfathomable information. At one point I said: This would never fly if their were a feature film. Nobody would believe it. Making a Murderer is the latest in a relatively small but excellent tradition of murder cases re-told through live documentary: the Paradise Lost series, Serial Season 1, the under-appreciated The Staircase being 3 of the best. Like those, this account is about a crime, of course, but it's also a socioeconomic portrait of a marginal community, as well as a great mystery - you're constantly trying to figure it out, and repeatedly surprised and brought up short.