It’s fitting that Life and Death Row is on BBC3, the network given its own death penalty on 15 February 2016 when it became an online-only channel. But, like an inmate marked for execution, BBC3 has found ways of continuing its appeal. This week’s new series of the award-winning court-case documentary has been reworked for the digital crowd.
The first three series of Life and Death Row were documentaries built to fit the hour-long slots that have been the basic unit of television for most of its history. But the fourth instalment, Love Triangle, has been divided into eight 10-minute episodes, which will be available online at 11am and 4pm every day until Thursday.
This is a radical decision, as two US legal series that have clearly influenced this show – Serial and Making a Murderer – stuck to traditional half-hour or hour-long chunks, even though they were made for WBEZ radio and Netflix respectively.
Yet the short segments prove very effective. As in all real-life crime stories, the audience’s suspicions and sympathies swing, but the bite-size chunks guarantee frequent cliffhangers, as if viewers are jurors at a trial conducted by a weak-bladdered judge who keeps taking adjournments at especially tense moments.
We gradually piece together the true-life story of Emilia Carr, sentenced by a Florida jury to death by lethal injection for the first-degree murder and kidnapping of Heather Strong, with whom she competed for the romantic attentions of Joshua Fulgham, who is serving two life terms for the abduction and killing of Strong.
Some viewers will presumably stockpile episodes and watch in one block at the end of the week. But encouragement to take a bite twice daily is provided by the dropping online, alongside episodes, of supporting material that includes witness statements and police interviews.
An obvious risk of the flourishing genre in which trials are reinvestigated by documentary is to give the impression that everyone in US penitentiary is innocent. In this case, as in the Steven Avery proceedings in Making a Murderer, the concern may be more over the purity of the process (both involve confessions secured without legal counsel present) than the probity of the suspects. The conviction of Carr also raises interesting questions about whether women and especially those with young children (Carr gave birth to her fourth child in jail) should be treated differently from men with regard to imprisonment or execution.
For UK viewers, another discussion rumbling under Life and Death Row is whether the British legal system should be more hospitable to film-makers. The interviews here with Carr, lounging in her orange prison-issue jumpsuit, would not be possible with a British convict, and the easy availability of suspect and witness videos, plus courtroom footage, is the reason the murder doc is a US genre.
With discussions currently taking place over the extent to which cameras should be admitted to British courts, viewers of Life and Death Row will reflect (especially if they have also seen Making a Murderer) on whether such TV projects usefully subject the judiciary to scrutiny or whether, as some lawyers argue, they risk turning the public into a baying court of appeal that has not heard all of the evidence.
For me, Love Triangle sensitively balances the protestations of the convicted with the claims of the victim, who cannot be interviewed. One of the detectives talks about the importance of “making Heather a person”, and, by doing so through interviews with relatives, the programme avoids succumbing to the appeal-lawyer fever that can overtake such shows. The new format also makes a strong case for the post-execution potency of traditional networks that migrate online. Whether you find that encouraging or worrying may depend on your age.
