Netflix’s New No. 1 Show Is a Must-Watch for a Certain Type of Person. I’m Not So Sure It Should Be.

Television The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare does its best, but the facts of the case only offer so much. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? July 30, 20262:00 PM Netflix Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Netflix has become king of the true-crime documentary that attempts to explain the inexplicable. Consider this week’s A Toxic Love Story, wherein a U.S. marshal and his pregnant girlfriend claim his ex is sending them harassing messages, and that she even set up the girlfriend to be raped. The reality is even more perplexing: The marshal, it turns out, has been faking the messages, the girlfriend isn’t actually pregnant (she also faked cancer in the past, a fun little side plot), and he’s been framing his ex for reasons that seemingly don’t go beyond his interest in abusing her. The gratification you can find in these documentaries relies on how much of an obvious and clear motive you need in your crime content. An answer isn’t always satisfying, even if it’s the only answer to give. Yet another somewhat unsatisfying true-crime documentary enters the Netflix canon this week. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare is a three-part docuseries about Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin, the four college students allegedly murdered by then-Ph.D. student Bryan Kohberger in November 2022. The series moves through the expected beats in a true-crime documentary, offering backgrounds on the four people killed, the way their murders took place, and ultimately, Kohberger’s possible motive for such a brutal crime. The timing is apt, too: This week, Kohberger sought to abandon his guilty plea and get a trial instead, saying he was misled into a confession. (He declined to tell the New York Times what evidence he has related to his innocence, or any other specifics about his new plea.) Within these three Netflix episodes is a story of pure horror. Some of the victims had been friends since childhood, and were living together in off-campus housing while attending the University of Idaho. (Chapin was the boyfriend of one of the victims, and was spending the night. There were others in the house that night as well, but they survived.) That night in November, the friends returned to the house late after attending a frat party. It’s alleged that Kohberger entered their house in the middle of the night and stabbed four of them to death. Four attractive, young, educated, white victims and a perplexingly grisly crime has made for media catnip in the four years since their murders. On TikTok, you can still find psychics and fortune tellers offering their two cents on what happened in that house. Couch-side criminologists have been picking apart available evidence for years, trying to make sense of why Kohberger targeted this house and these people in particular. Even after Kohberger’s plea, which ostensibly would have ended the case, it remained a fixture on Court TV and true-crime YouTube. Netflix isn’t even the first to make a docuseries about the crime—last summer, Peacock released The Idaho Student Murders and Amazon Prime released the four-part series One Night in Idaho: The College Murders within weeks of one another. The Amazon project was greenlit for a second season, and since then, Kohberger has changed his plea, giving the story yet another hard-to-grasp curveball. It’s especially rare for a postconviction plea like his to win, but it certainly provides more grist for the content mill. Netflix’s offering is as capable and explicatory as any of the others. To watch it, you have to accept that you’ll be awash in grief. Unlike A Toxic Love Story, there’s no schadenfreude in watching the ostensible criminal be caught—he’s already allegedly killed a group of college friends, no matter what his sentence ends up being. Unlike Netflix’s The Crash from earlier this summer, about a young woman found guilty of killing her boyfriend and his friend in a seemingly intentional car crash, there’s not much police-vest footage or TikTok archive to pick through. The Idaho Murders is an explanation of something that remains largely inexplicable. When the families speak in the documentary about how they wished Kohberger would have gotten the death penalty, how they wish they could have gone to trial, you can understand why. There’s been no trial, no cross-examination, no real closure of the why of it all (though if Kohberger’s new plea is accepted, that might change). The facts of the case so far can only offer so much. You won’t leave this Netflix series with a better understanding of why Kohberger may have killed all these people. The documentary ventures a few theories, mostly ones around the idea that Kohberger was an incel, and that he resented the women he went to college with. That idea seems about as likely as any other, and it’s a worthy thread to pull. The Idaho Murders talks to his classmates at Washington State University who took a criminal justice program with him and were disturbed by his behaviour. At school, he was dismissive and especially disparaging to the women in his class. Even faculty members were concerned about him becoming a professor and eventually harassing his female students. People in the department were worried he might eventually sexually assault someone after he allegedly broke into a female grad student’s apartment. Shortly before he was arrested, he was fired from his TA job. As in so many of these sad cases, a baseline loathing of women feels obvious and true, so is it fair to be lightly disappointed when that’s the answer? Maybe the hope of watching all these documentaries about young lives snuffed away is that we find something more tangible, a reason for carnage that can be remedied or studied or scientifically corroborated. Instead, it’s an eerily familiar story told for several generations: If Kohberger did indeed do it, as he previously admitted he did, then there isn’t some big heady reason. Mental illness or sexism: Either way, they feel inevitable. Those punished by it, it seems, are all too often young women in a college class, gearing up for an entire lifetime of protecting themselves against unknowable male dangers. Get the best of culture Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more. Crime Netflix Documentaries