If you've ever found yourself thinking, "Wow, I really hope someone makes a 4,000th documentary about Charles Manson, but this time with absolutely zero new information and a bunch of annoying reenactments," then buckle up. Netflix has finally answered your incredibly weird prayers.
Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes hypes up "never-before-heard audio" from the "cult leader" himself. What do we actually get? We get bad dramatizations, Vincent Bugliosi's exact same version of events we've been hearing since the Nixon administration, and Charlie literally reciting the Our Father. Move over, Pulitzer committee—we have some groundbreaking journalism here!
Somewhere right now, author Jeff Guinn is probably screaming into a pillow, yelling, “I ALREADY COVERED THIS A DECADE AGO!” Which is incredibly bold, considering his 500-page "definitive" 2013 biography of Manson is famously packed with more inaccuracies than a politician's tax return.
If Netflix wanted to rehash the same tired narrative, they couldn't have picked a more hilarious foundation than Guinn's book. This is the same author who confidently declared that Manson's entire cult-leading strategy was born from reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in prison. Yes, you read that right. According to Guinn, all you need to start a murderous cult is the same self-help book your uncle read to get a promotion at State Farm.
Even better, Guinn's book boldly claims that Manson went back to the Tate murder scene to "rearrange" it for dramatic effect, specifically taking an American flag out of a closet and draping it over a couch. A chilling, mastermind detail... except for the fact that the housekeeper testified the flag was already there, and there are literally pre-murder photographs proving it was just sitting on the couch the whole time. So, not only is Netflix beating a 57-year-old dead horse, but they're basically tracing over the factually bankrupt homework of a guy who couldn't even fact-check a couch cushion.
Even the professional critics are struggling to justify this docuseries' existence. Over at Decider , they crowned it "the most frustrating entry in Joe Berlinger's docuseries franchise," noting that you have to suffer through "narrative misfires" just to get a microscopic tidbit of new audio. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle praised it for being "reasoned, responsible and detailed." You know what else is reasoned, responsible, and detailed? A microwave instruction manual, and frankly, I'd rather read that.
Instead of providing any chilling new insights into a notorious criminal mind, director Joe Berlinger basically grabbed the cameras and decided to film a Wikipedia article. You know a true-crime doc has officially flatlined when viewers admit on Reddit to turning it off mid-episode to go binge the canceled 2011 Pan Am series just to feel a pulse.
The only current "conversation" happening here is Netflix asking, "Can we milk this story one more time?" and the audience shouting, "Please, we are so tired."
Verdict: Save your time. The Manson cinematic universe is officially out of material. If you want to listen to an erratic old man ramble incoherently while a bunch of people try to figure out what it means, just go to your family's Thanksgiving dinner.
And then there's the glaring, George-Stimson-sized hole in the entire production. If you're making a documentary about Charles Manson, you might think to call the guy who spent over a decade regularly visiting him in prison, clocked hundreds of hours on the phone with him, and wrote the literal rebuttal to Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter. But Netflix? Hard pass. Why? As Stimson perfectly sums it up to Buddy Day, he knew the second they ghosted him that the filmmakers were terrified of "getting too far afield from the standard narrative." Heaven forbid a so-called documentary actually stray from the cozy, regurgitated mythology we've been spoon-fed since 1970! Netflix clearly couldn't risk Stimson bringing his decades of firsthand nuance to the table, because that would mean doing the current work of dismantling the "same old, same old" Helter Skelter boogeyman they needed for cheap binge-watchability. After all, why let an actual subject matter expert derail your neatly packaged true-crime cash grab with pesky, inconvenient realities? It's much easier to just hire a few actors in cheap wigs, play the hits, and pretend the guy who actually knows the score simply doesn't exist.
You can watch George and Buddy discuss it here
