The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park is a true-crime documentary that's more than a lurid retrospective

The Washington Post

The AMC/Sundance three-part documentary re-examines the August 1986 death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin and the "subsequent, drawn-out media coverage and trial of her confessed killer, Robert Chambers, then 19, who claimed he choked her while defending himself from her advances," says Hank Stuever. "Airing over three nights beginning Wednesday on both AMC and Sundance TV, The Preppy Murder ... takes every advantage of our present-day cravings for meticulously paced tales of true crime, an obsession I lately find dispiriting and counterproductive, almost verging on repugnant. TV today is packed with murder, murder, murder, with storytellers who are still too often obsessed with the creeps who commit the crimes. The victims (and their grieving survivors) are useful mainly for their tears. Yet even I admit that the Levin case remains a fascinating, heartbreaking and — as emphasized in this series — infuriating tale. The story still powerfully conjures the perennial subtexts about class and economic background (uptown and downtown; Jewish and Catholic; blue-collar resentment of white-collar privilege; female sexual desire weighed against the entitled male libido), and in many ways, it presaged much of the narrative framework of our modern crime shows and podcasts, from Law & Order forward. Levin’s strangulation also serves as an eerie prequel of sorts to the attack on the Central Park jogger in 1989 and the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994."

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• To watch The Preppy Murder is to feel like you’re being reminded of every pernicious notion that metastasized in American culture during the 1980s
• The Preppy Murder is choppy and limited, but full of intriguing first-hand accounts
• The Preppy Murder addresses victim-blaming headlines following the killing of Jennifer Levin