The Curious Case of...

Tabloid-style fake caring riddled with hypocrisy. This show criticizes people for seeking the limelight while shamelessly doing the same.

The first episode promises to focus on Bam, but it's painfully clear they didn't have enough material to carry the story. Instead, it rehashes tired Britney Spears narratives and shifts the spotlight onto a couple of ancillary characters who add little to the overall narrative.

What could have been an insightful exploration instead feels like a shallow attempt to exploit viewers' curiosity without offering anything meaningful or new.

MAX has fallen a great deal.

Beginning with the Natalia Grace series, and continuing here, are stories about people who have been deeply abused and live a life greatly affected by it. We then are treated to a bunch of anecdotal interviews by people who have little understanding of trauma responses, expressing their confusion at the actions of a traumatized person, with little nuance or explanation of how trauma affects a person and their ability to act 'normally'.

While I can understand the average neighbor not having the foreknowledge of trauma responses and how a person can appear strange to outsiders or even loved ones, the show runners live in the current era and have no excuse for not acknowledging this as an important topic of discussion.

Hire a therapist to sit there with that lawyer lady, give us the legal perspective along with the mental health perspective.

Granted I'm only twenty minutes into the first episode about Bam Margera, but my initial reaction is how seriously this show wants to take people that honestly don't seem to know what they're doing or talking about. First you have Lima who watches Bam go on a rampage or listens to his mother yearn to have her son back, and this so called professional just stands there like a deer in headlights, with a complete look of bafflement on her face. She's the shining example of being in over your head.

Next we meet a YouTuber/influencer/apparent lawyer who can't even remember the oath she swore to become a lawyer. She has all the credibility of a homeschooled professional. She complains that people don't take her seriously while very much sounding like someone that shouldn't be taking seriously. She's also got pink panda ears in her hair which makes her look like a middle school girl fighting for attention.

I'm not really sure what the goal of this series is, but at the onset it is less an intent of journalistic integrity and more a sleezy tabloid show taking advantage of some truly weird people who have no idea they're being used.

Aside from the stories being uninteresting, the episodes being full of weird hippie types and each episode seems to go on forever, Beth Karas just gets more and more grating as time goes on.

Most docuseries have a different "expert" for each car, if not multiples per episode. But they just have Karas through the entire season. She doesn't really add any expertise or first hand knowledge of a case, she just recaps what was said in the prior 4 minutes.

The whole series seems low budget and amateurish. Usually MAX docs are really good, this feels like something from a 2nd rate cable network. Just bad.

This feels like complete satire and so sad it is not. We are expected to demonize the woman who came up with a possible mental health solution because she does not have a degree and looks pretty? Because the crazy lawyer (?) with Pom poms in her hair and obsession with Britney Spears believes it was a conspiracy? Terrible programming. Tone deaf given our current state of affairs in the nation. I was looking for something more uplifting/kind.

It was so bad that I, someone that has never rated anything on IMDb, felt compelled to let everyone else know.

Not sure what that to say here but please don't waste your time. And HBO, SMH.