Missing teen gets reality show treatment

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/02/2024 (603 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sixteen-year-old Sara Parcell gets off the school bus — a bright girl, violin prodigy, good athlete, starting a totally ordinary day at her suburban Maryland high school — realizes she’s left her backpack on the bus and vanishes.

And what follows is the cliché of every parent’s worst nightmare: calling all her friends, retracing Sara’s steps, their concern turning to terror, trying to convince the police to act immediately, though the cops shrug that teens take off and — cliché alert — show up after their curfew 99 times out of 100.

The community rallies and volunteers launch ground searches, checking behind every tree, going through iffy buildings; the police roust the usual sexual deviant suspects.

And no Sara.

It goes without saying that lots of people herein are hiding secrets, many people are not who they appear to be, pretty much everyone is lying about something. A perfect recipe for a Gilly MacMillan or Shari Lapena-type mystery.

Except … swooping into town and into the Parcell family’s lives is slimy Casey, budding Hollywood superstar producing sleazy reality TV shows (redundancy alert).

And author Daniel Sweren-Becker takes an entirely innovative approach, forgoing narrative in favour of hundreds of clips from interviews with 26 people 10 years after the tragic events.

Tragic, because you know things don’t end well in murder mysteries. How they end, well, you’ll have to read Kill Show to find out.

Sara’s parents Doug and Jeannette are in a dire way financially. Doug lost his business, is reluctantly working for Jeannette’s dad, the bills are all overdue and the banker across the street is threatening to foreclose. Sara needs $12,000 for a summer camp at Juilliard to launch a brilliant career as a classical musician.

Meanwhile their son Jack, Sara’s little brother, is secretly filming them and posting online, which goes viral and catches Casey’s attention. Your book club may want to discuss how sure they are that their own kids aren’t secretly filming them and posting it all online.

Casey arrives at a typical suburban hotel and there, in the bar of lonely, unattached people, who should be sitting there but hunky Felix, lead detective on Sara’s disappearance and presumed abduction. Casey is somewhat circumspect about why she’s in town. (Adult content ensues.)

Doug and Jeannette are horrified at Casey’s pitch, until she mentions they’ll be paid $50,000 an episode. Bingo.

Casey reckons rightly that a reality show during a crisis, with no clue of the outcome, will be a hit — and indeed it is. America can’t get enough of someone else’s misery and tragedy.

Casey convinces herself she’s there on a mission to save Sara through the attention the show will generate and, it goes without saying, none of this could possibly be about her and her career. She clings to that story 10 years later.

Some people claiming to know nothing about Sara’s situation are terrified that the police and reality show’s investigation will reveal their secrets: one of Sara’s 16-year-old BFFs is in a sexual relationship with an adult high school volleyball coach (or, in other words, an adult is raping a minor); another person is dealing pills.

The reality show isn’t a linear diary laid out in prime time every few evenings. Casey edits, she cuts here, she inserts there, she juxtaposes, she has the camera linger on someone for the longest time. She suggests suspects. Each episode has to end with a bang, the bigger the better.

Not that different than how Sweren-Becker edits and lays out his clips — dread building, tantalizing hints that bad times are just ahead.

Careers are destroyed along the way. Innocent people in handcuffs do the perp walk. Lies are exposed. People may die.

Kill Show is an exceedingly sharp murder mystery and social commentary. The retrospective interviews writing technique may eventually lose some novelty value, but Sweren-Becker has done quite the job of it.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin would never let a creepy reality show into his house. Nope, no way. Oh wait, now you’re saying $75,000 per episode — do I hear 100?