UNITED STATES
Slate
By Kathryn VanArendonk
This article originally appeared in Vulture.
Netflix’s new true-crime series The Keepers tells a familiar story. As its very thorough trailer makes clear, it’s a series about a murder, with the added fillip of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church—a tale so common that it’s now been told through investigative journalism, an Oscar-winning film, and multiple Law & Order episodes.
And yet, at its core, The Keepers is built on a different scale than many of the other series in its true-crime cohort. Where shows like The Jinx or Making a Murderer focus intensely on a small handful of individuals, and tend to center their storytelling on a few obsessively detailed criminal investigations, The Keepers casts an unusually wide net. From the initial focus on the death of one nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik, it then spins outward to encompass a story full of horrific sexual abuse, apparent cover-ups, and a massive web of tenuous, suggestive, notable, and often unproven connections.
If you’re looking for analogous models in fictional series, The Keepers is not Top of the Lake or The Honorable Woman or True Detective. Many fictional crime series reach for broad networks of conspiracy, but they almost always boil down to a few primary players: the detective. The murderer. The red herring. The key witness. The Keepers doesn’t work that way; it is not Sherlock Holmes. It’s The Wire.
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