Netflix has a new limited series out ‘Missing: Dead or Alive’ and it is one of the most bizarre intersections of reality television and drama. There are already click-bait style articles on Women’s Health asking if it is ‘real or staged’. I’m not surprised, there is a surreal element to the entire show that makes you wonder if this is all just elaborate acting and setup.
The age of hyperreality.
Procedural cop shows began as thrilling high speed footage, think Cops. TV crews would follow at a bit of a distance, it was new and groundbreaking for the time but the sense of distance was there. There might be interviews with officers but very clearly they were interviews. We might get genuine moments of a conversation between victim, criminal, or police officer but never from multiple camera angles like a setup and staged interview. The narrator was clearly a voice actor reading a script.
Missing: Dead or Alive is the opposite. It feels like a movie at times. There is no neutral narrator, we instead are treated to the thoughts of two actual officers. Are these their thoughts? Are these notes massaged by a script writer? Is this all the product of the script writer perhaps? The cinematography is no different, where once we had raw rushed footage now we have clearly staged shows. Investigator Rains running at night as she monologues. The search teams setting off under a drone. Perhaps the most surreal moment (spoiler ahead) is when they locate a missing teenage girl and the sequence is filmed to show a drone zooming in on the pouty teen as the officers car pulls up. Is this real is a question that never goes away.
In truth this style is arguably more compelling to the audience. It completely removes any subtext that one might have gained before. Implicit ideas and thoughts are brought explicitly to the surface through the staged and recorded interviews. It is obvious that our female protagonist is struggling with the highs and lows but it is no longer permissible to just allow the audience to work it out, it must be explicitly stated and talked about by the woman herself. Like Game of Thrones this is the banality of modern story telling. GoT had hyper pornographic levels of evil and violence to make it clear to the midwit that power struggles in Kingdoms = bad. Here we get hyper realism to explain working missing persons cases = a struggle. At least the latter message is genuine and not warped propaganda though.
The hyper-reality element is finalized with the interviews that play out in parallel to the police work with the families of the missing. It is depressing and odd. In the first case you are led to believe it certainly is a case of matricide only for the mother to be found alive. Why else would they interview the mentally ill former door kicker about his weird behavior and explanation? This victim interviewing takes a darker turn at times - one victim’s wife is in denial about his drug use. Her working class white kids know he has taken drugs, they themselves are all drug addicts. The degeneration and deracination of these whites is depressing to behold. They talk and behave more like blacks. A community wrecked by the elites. Here of course there is no real engagement, the producers gloss this ugly reality to an extent. The story here is about the police officers.
Hyperreality television is here to stay. True crime podcasters may be to blame but perhaps it is just part of this state of decline we are in. Everything must be controlled, managed, staged by the regime. The stars of this show are women and a black male officer. No doubt a reality of the missing persons unit but at no point are the white male colleagues ever made to look like anything more than NPCs. The raw appeal of reality crime television like Cops is that it gave an unfiltered glimpse into the reality of policing. That is now gone, everything is now filtered and narrative centric, nothing can be trusted.
Even the show Cops was highly curated. The shows producers said in interviews they selected which incidents to show on order to maintain a r'acial balance'.