Has Netflix Found Its Next Making a Murderer?

By Hillary Busis
Vanity Fair
April 17, 2017

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/04/netflix-making-a-murderer-the-keepers-sister-cathy-murder

Once upon a time, Making a Murderer’s intense focus on a fishy-seeming murder case—one that invited viewers to serve as both judge and jury—led scores of people to compare the show to Serial, the hit podcast generally credited with spurring the recent true-crime revival. Now, though, the Netflix series’s own success—and the long gap between its first season and its second, which still hasn’t premiered—has left fans and commentators hungry for another show to compare to Making a Murderer itself. Was Netflix’s Amanda Knox documentary the next Making a Murderer? (No, it was a one-off movie.) What about Discovery Channel’s Killing Fields? (Nah, reviews were mixed, and it never really captured the zeitgeist.) Will an upcoming adaptation of The Von Bulow Affair do the trick? (Maybe, though if it’s airing on Investigation Discovery, probably not.)

It’s possible, of course, that there is no “next” Making a Murderer. Perhaps, though, we’ve just been waiting all this time for The Keepers, an upcoming seven-part (ding) series on Netflix (ding) that investigates the “unsolved murder of a nun and the horrific secrets and pain that linger nearly five decades after her death” (ding ding ding).

We don’t yet know much else about The Keepers, beyond its premiere date (May 19) and the fact that it’s directed by Ryan White—whose bona fides include marriage equality doc The Case Against 8 and 2016’s Serena, a portrait of one of history’s greatest tennis players. (Not to be confused with 2014’s Serena, that Bradley Cooper-Jennifer Lawrence movie you forgot existed until just now.) We do know, though, that according to Netflix, the series “will have everyone asking the question ‘who killed Sister Cathy?’ “ That tagline indicates the series will investigate the curious case of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a Baltimore nun whose decades-old unsolved murder could be connected to a church sexual-abuse scandal. In other words: sign us up.