Cold Case Files

Bill Curtis sells this show. Its already entertaining with all the insight into forensics but with Bills narration its double fun

One of the episodes is about a cab driver who was shot & killed in 1961. The bullet had fragmented into 3 pieces & the 2 groups of men examining the rifling couldn't conclusively say it was or wasn't fired from the suspects gun. Over 40 yrs later, same story, so they sent the fragments to an outside source. This man cleaned the blood & brain matter off the fragments & got a positive match. The men involved in re-opening the case were astounded & amazed & called it a miracle. I am completely apalled & flabbergasted that no one thought of cleaning the fragments 40 yrs earlier & that the men who re-opened the case thought it was so amazing & fantastic that someone thought to clean the fragments to see rifling. Really???

A&E's prime-time whodunit show is chock full of mysteries, but perhaps the biggest puzzler came in late 2003, when the program received an actual nomination for an actual Emmy Award. While nobody claims that the Emmys represent the paragon of mankind's artistic achievement, the fact that "Cold Case Files" managed to sneak into the Outstanding Nonfiction race was a disservice to all the truly talented folks who work in television.

"Cold Case Files," which examines murder cases solved years after their initial investigations, has no trouble rounding up intriguing tales; the real-life crime world, after all, comes with as much drama as any season of "CSI." The show's problem lies in its presentation.

Most glaring is the writing, which is downright atrocious -- often laugh-out-loud bad. It's purple prose at its most ludicrous, loaded with narrative along the lines of, "Jane Smith and her sister have just driven across a rough patch in the road called life." It's bad enough that "Cold Case Files," like so many of today's documentary shows, tells its stories in a jarring present tense. (What's called the historical present tense, to be precise: "John Jones is sentenced to murder in 1978.") Making it worse, though, is that many of the scripts can't keep up with themselves; you'll hear the present tense followed immediately by the past tense, despite no shift in the story's actual chronology. It's almost understandable: Events that took place in the past should be recounted in the past tense, and it's easy to imagine writers occasionally slipping during the struggle against this natural instinct.

Whatever the case, it's bad, bad writing.

There's an air of melodrama, too, oozing out of "Cold Case Files." The show's most inadvertently funny device is the occasional use of dark re-verb on the voices of interviewees, intended to transform certain sound bites ("That's when I knew we had a homicide on our hands") into chilling comments. Instead, in my family room at least, the cheesy gimmick serves as a reliable cue for hearty guffaws all around.

For solid real-life crime drama, Court TV's nightly lineup is a far better bet. Even A&E's own "American Justice" -- produced, inexplicably, by the same folks who botch "Cold Case Files" every week -- is a masterpiece next to this unintended chuckle fest.

I've watched the first season on Netflix so this review is based on that.

I'm glad each of these crimes was solved, but it is painfully clear that the producers had minimal footage for some of them as the same clips are featured several times in short succession, not even always cut all that differently. I found myself getting irritated, like we KNOW. He ALREADY SAID THAT. It doesn't make for gripping viewing. Better to feature, say, three crimes in an episode than two, repeating the same footage to pad them out.

Even worse, rather than presenting the material in the serious, perhaps contemplative way that the victims deserved, it is painfully sensationalised. Instead of allowing the interviews with family, detectives and the like to speak for themselves, the interviews and photos are cut to force dun dun DUUUUN moments.

Apart from that this just makes for terrible TV, I feel like it is disrespectful to the victims and the people they left behind. It's vastly inappropriate to melodramatise tragedies.

This show is really a great show in My opinion. It shows the real thing. Its on the A&E every week. It narrated by Anthony Green! Some of the cases are graphic because these things really happened and are not made up. I would not recommend a young child to watch this program without the guidance of a parent. The show gives the viewer the knowledge of how the F.B.I., Detectives, and Police Officers do their work that is not as easy as you would think. The show is an excellent program to watch for people who love to see real crimes getting solved and killers getting jailed. If you like to see real crimes getting solved then I strongly recommend that you check out A&E and watch this show today!