Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey and not-so-great expectations

The crime
The murder of JonBenét Ramsey on Christmas night, 1996.

The story
My esteemed colleague Daniel Fienberg referred to Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey as “schlocky” on Bluesky the other day, and while that’s not exactly my issue with it, I agree with Fienberg re: audiences saying “nah” to Netflix’s three-parter – it’s not worth your time. 

But it’s not because it’s badly made. Joe Berlinger directs, so you can assume a level of competence. The thing is…Joe Berlinger directs, so you can also assume a level of complacence as far as innovative production, and sure enough, the AV clichés start rolling out without delay: pyramids of vintage TVs and VCRs, playing contemporary news footage; tableaux lingering on the ransom note (which is read aloud by half a dozen different voice actors, so at least that choice is interesting); pan-and-scans of stacks of tabloid covers. 

Predictable b-roll from Cold Case. (Netflix)

There’s nothing per se wrong with a formulaic approach, but a case this exhaustively covered calls for a fresh perspective. Casting JonBenét has its detractors, but at least director Kitty Green tried to say something else about the tragedy and what the coverage of it said – and still says – about the American criminal-justice and media complexes.

You won’t get that here. You’ll get footage you haven’t seen before, of Patsy Ramsey talking to a documentarian and of Patsy and John’s wedding; you’ll get excellent access, because it’s Berlinger and it’s a Netflix joint and almost everyone will agree to participate; you’ll get the customary self-regarding interview with Berlinger about the project in which he drive-bys other properties and filmmakers. But Cold Case isn’t going do anything new with those materials and interviews, because Berlinger is a traditionalist (and kind of a gatekeeper) – and again, that’s fine.

But here in 2024, if you have seldom-seen interviews from the aughts, and Boulder reporters and law enforcement talking-heads, and all the other docs and commentary about the case going back decades, why not make that material work another way? Why not create a production-office crazy-wall timeline of the case, add some color-coding for various elements (movements of the family; Boulder PD drama; evidence collection and handling), and see if there isn’t a narrower newer way to put the story together that broadens the collective thinking about the case?

After watching 2 of the 3 eps, at least I didn’t spot Matt Lauer in the contemporary footage, thank god. (Netflix)

“The Ramseys were unfairly maligned,” “advances in testing could help close the case” – we know all that. Anyone who clicks on Cold Case likely is familiar with the broad strokes and doesn’t need a file review, either. Either tell us something that’s else, or rearrange all the somethings we already know to make a pattern we haven’t seen.

We’ve joked a lot around here about starting a rumble with Joe Berlinger, but I don’t actually need that to happen; Berlinger is a hall-of-famer, rightly so, and he’s going to do what he does in the documentary space, which is fine – I don’t need him to go avant-garde. Cold Case: JonBenét is perfectly fine for newcomers to the story. I also didn’t watch the last episode yet, so maybe there’s a new theory of the case here, which, great. But if there isn’t a new theory of the case, and there isn’t a new presentation of the facts of the case, when the director is a name in the field and has all the tools to re-imagine how we talk about said case, it’s hard not to see the series as a missed opportunity above all.

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