New Hulu Series Goes Inside a Family’s Hell: One Child Abducted, Another Turned Serial Killer

Captive Audience is the story of a family beset by unthinkable misfortune, and the way in which one tragedy may have served as the catalyst for another. Yet more intriguing still is the Hulu docuseries’ investigation of the fundamental—and potentially deleterious—role that the media played in exacerbating this clan’s circumstances.

Formally intertwining fiction and reality with impressive subtlety, director Jessica Dimmock and executive-producers Joe and Anthony Russo’s three-part affair (April 21) is an aesthetically assured and inescapably chilling look at a hopeless tangle of fact and fantasy, and the horrors, and unanswerable questions, it begat.

Viewers of a certain age will likely remember Steven Stayner, thanks to NBC’s two-part 1989 TV movie about his ordeal, I Know My First Name is Steven. That blockbuster program starring Corin Nemec (which garnered nearly 40 million viewers) was a heavily hyped and discussed small-screen event, memorable for its portrait of both child abduction and the ensuing difficulty of post-kidnapping re-adjustment into society. Much of that popularity was due to Nemec’s celebrated lead performance.

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