True Crime Is Tragedy

And Last Call makes you wonder why it doesn't always seem that way.

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ON THE SURFACE, Last Call looks like dozens of other true-crime series. All the familiar visual language is in place: re-created scenes, lots of talking heads, timelines that flash across the screen, piles of documents and police evidence. Most true-crime docuseries use this kind of material to add up to proof of guilt or to draw out the pleasurable frustration of a mystery that hasn’t yet been solved. Last Call has those things but deploys them with a marked lack of fanfare. Given the course of a story that’s subtitled When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, it’s necessary to identify a killer and to consider that person’s life and the details of their crimes, yet Last Call treats those narrative tropes with near reluctance. Yes, these things are important, but other things matter more.

Directed by Anthony Caronna and adapted from the book of the same name by Elon Green, Last Call makes a suggestive companion to the recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry,” which casts a sardonic eye on the true-crime genre: its promise of sensitivity and the result of naked sensationalism. As a story about a serial killer who murdered several queer men in New York in the early ’90s,