For anyone who never followed the Maddie McCann abduction story (a three year-old girl abducted from her vacationing British parents' Portugal hotel room), this is an excruciatingly in-depth retelling of the story in the wake of the 2017 tenth anniversary of her disappearance.
Since the story was never covered as extensively in the US as it was in Britain, likely much of what it presents will be new to US viewers as it goes over what happened immediately following her disappearance and the investigations that ensued.
The series never goes anywhere but a dead end, though, since the case has never been solved and Maddie is still missing. All it does to wrap up is speculate on why she was taken - speculation that seems heavily influenced by the recent Washington, DC Comet Tavern conspiracy hoax rather than actual evidence from the McCann case.
This all could have been done in a two-hour documentary, not a multiple episode series. As a result, it gets tiresome and repetitive as the filmmakers try to fill all that time.
It raises some issues that deserve in-depth examination, but just skims right past them. One, why is the abduction of a pale blonde white child more important, tragic, and newsworthy than the abduction of a child of color (any color, even olive-skinned)? And two, why are there no repercussions for the media, especially the tabloids, for their reprehensible behavior?
As for the McCann parents, if they're guilty of anything, it's gross (criminal in some jurisdictions) negligence for leaving a three year-old and two 18-months old asleep and unattended in a hotel room in a foreign country while they went to the other side of the hotel compound to dine and socialize with friends. No matter how they try to justify what they did, it was simply wrong. They share in the responsibility for whatever happened to their daughter. My sympathy for them is very limited.
Since the story was never covered as extensively in the US as it was in Britain, likely much of what it presents will be new to US viewers as it goes over what happened immediately following her disappearance and the investigations that ensued.
The series never goes anywhere but a dead end, though, since the case has never been solved and Maddie is still missing. All it does to wrap up is speculate on why she was taken - speculation that seems heavily influenced by the recent Washington, DC Comet Tavern conspiracy hoax rather than actual evidence from the McCann case.
This all could have been done in a two-hour documentary, not a multiple episode series. As a result, it gets tiresome and repetitive as the filmmakers try to fill all that time.
It raises some issues that deserve in-depth examination, but just skims right past them. One, why is the abduction of a pale blonde white child more important, tragic, and newsworthy than the abduction of a child of color (any color, even olive-skinned)? And two, why are there no repercussions for the media, especially the tabloids, for their reprehensible behavior?
As for the McCann parents, if they're guilty of anything, it's gross (criminal in some jurisdictions) negligence for leaving a three year-old and two 18-months old asleep and unattended in a hotel room in a foreign country while they went to the other side of the hotel compound to dine and socialize with friends. No matter how they try to justify what they did, it was simply wrong. They share in the responsibility for whatever happened to their daughter. My sympathy for them is very limited.