I, Hostage

I'm surprised these stories are mostly from the distant past. Surely there have been countless hostage situations since then, especially since elite forces like S. W. A. T. have advanced by leaps and bounds. I found these interesting enough although there's a reason most shows use professional narration to tell the crux of a story: Because non profesionals are grating to listen to, in many cases, and are very bad at relating details. For that reason, the episodes are often hard to follow and piece together. Also confusing is the lengthy recapping each time it comes back from the expected commercial break because at first you think you're learning new info. Thank goodness for fastforward but if you go too far you'll miss an important detail.

It ends after the hostage situation ends, which seems appropriate to me since it's not a documentary about the criminal but about the hostage, although sometimes there are further details about the arrest or so forth in text at the very end.

If I were rating the competency of the police or SWAT, I'd have to say I think they wait too long to take action on almost every situation.

The narration is good when it does happen and is a nice voice, not one of those yappy high pitched excited tabloid style.

At first I binged episodes 1-4 and they were very interesting with one major flaw that continued to be present and consistent throughout the series. I agree with other reviews in the sense that while most episodes were good, the first 2 minutes after a break were literally a recap of what you just watched. The episodes have 10+ minutes of runtime being repetitive recaps of what happened up to point. This is the only glaring flaw as it comes across feeling more like a tactic to fill time rather than the standard quick recaps of most true crime stories. Take that out of the equation it's an interesting show with a good concept and most episodes did keep my attention. It is worth the watch if you know what to expect and have some chores to do in the 2-3 minutes of recap. I also should mention that the recaps are not unique content, they literally replay small portions that have already been thoroughly explained.

I was going to give this a 8. But after all episodes I was left wanting...Hence the 5. The episodes.regurgitates previous events of the story every 10 minutes. You keep hearing the same dialogue over.and over. And over again. I'm sorry.....Yes ...Over and over again. With proper editing...This could be a 30 min show But the worst part ...is that they dont tell you the CONCLUSION of the process. You will never know how long the guilty was imprisoned for or what happened when released. A lot of these crimes were committed many years ago. WE NEED ANSWERS. We need to know the final outcome of these crime.