DEJA VU: ABC’s new series “Final Witness” reinacts murders with voice-overs for the deceased. (
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There is only one show I seriously dislike on Investigation Discovery, the all true crime/all the time network.
And that winner (loser) is? “Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.”
I hate the entire conceit wherein the murder victim talks from the grave about the crime. I don’t mind cheese. In fact, I love cheese, the riper the better. But that series isn’t ripe cheese so much as smelly cheese.
Tomorrow night, ABC, of all networks, premieres a line-for-line knockoff of that series called “Final Witness,” and it’s such a ripoff that you may start banging your remote around, thinking it’s given you ID when you hit ABC.
And, except for the fact that the lighting is better, the actors are actually trained and aren’t shot in the ever-present laugh-out-loud lingerie sex scene, there is very little difference between the two shows.
The real shame here is that “Final Witness” is a good true-crime show. A very good true-crime show. But that voice-from-beyond narrator is just so very wrong.
Given that, tomorrow night’s premiere episode, “The Kid’s Aren’t Alright,” covers the horrible case of the Texas Caffey family, fundamentalist Christians who home-schooled their kids and had lives that revolved around the church. They were considered a great family.
Well, that is until teenage daughter Erin, the church soloist, met Charlie Wilkinson, who wasn’t what her parents had in mind for their teen. When Penny and Terry Caffey found ugly postings on Charlie’s Myspace page about Erin, they forced them to break up.
Most girls would scream, pout or, even at worst, run away from home.
Not Erin. She decided it would be better to have Charlie kill her parents instead.
On the night of the murders, Erin snuck out of the house at 2 a.m., rode around with Charlie, his friend Charles Wade and Wade’s girlfriend, Bobbi Johnson in Bobbi’s car planning the murders.
Bobbi and Erin sat in the car while the two Charlies went inside the house with guns and Samurai swords, and proceeded to shoot and slash her mother, her father and her two little brothers — the youngest, 8 years old, was hiding in the closet when the Samurai psychos slashed him to death.
They then set the house on fire — but somehow dad, Terry, who’d been shot five times, escaped and crawled miles to a neighbor’s house.
Erin, meantime, had things to do — like go back to Charlie’s family’s trailer and have sex.
Everything about this oft-told tale is done very well here — they have the confession tapes plus interviews with the investigators, prosecutors and even Terry — so, why, oh why, the truly terrible fake voice-over of the dead mother?
I have no idea, but it’s a real crime.