The Takedown: American Aryans

I found this documentary to be both informative and timely given the era of heightened white grievance/white Christian nationalism in our nation. Living in the South, I've seen people with ABT tattoos and who have these beliefs and was always fascinated - how could anyone believe one race is better than another? This show interviews a former ABT member, LEO, and experts about the ABT, their hierarchy, their rules, and their beliefs. I stayed riveted throughout the entire thing. My hats off to the LEO that can go undercover and infiltrate such groups! I had anxiety for them as I was watching the show. The Takedown is that these groups always have and will likely always (unfortunately) continue to exist.

When will producers and directors learn that they need to edit themselves.

A good indication that a documentary needs some heavy edits is when the documentary repeatedly shows the same scenes and pictures over and over again.

Another indication is storylines that may be somewhat interesting but really add nothing to the story.

This documentary is guilty of lots of scene padding that ultimately slows down the pacing and makes the documentary less interesting.

Four episodes was way to long considering how they decided to approach the subject. This could have been wrapped up in two episodes had they focused on compact, impactful storytelling instead of the meandering that is present here.

Feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Scaling back on the melodramatic mood and brooding editing style would have served this series better, seeing as how its disturbing and extreme content is already heavy enough.

The content should be handled seriously, of course, but there is often a lean in shows like this where methods of documenting a gang is deliberately produced in a creepy and unsettling fashion, which betrays the legitimate educational value.

It's at its best when focusing on the efforts of law enforcement to dismantle this gang, and the narrative does unfold clearly. For the most part, it's well made. Access to police interrogation footage and on-screen evidence is used responsibly, mixed with reenactments where necessary.

That said, they could've shortcutted a lot of points, especially when they overemphasize the nasty personalities of certain gang members (we get it, they're bad dudes), often describing the violence of their crimes to exhaustive lengths that no longer serve any good after a certain point.

And that's how we arrived at 4 episodes at 1 hour each, and you can't help but wonder if a trilogy would have sufficed with the right editing, or even just a single movie at 2 hours and change. The content is solid, but just too spread thin.