Time collapses around local tragedy. Sitting in a tiny station in a small town in Wisconsin, waiting to catch a train home for Christmas, I struck up a conversation with a man who had lived in the area for his entire life. When I told him I was reviewing Making a Murderer, a new a documentary series about the Steven Avery case up in Manitowoc County, his face fell. “Ohh,” he said quietly, glancing away. “Steven Avery. I think he was sick to begin with. And then getting his nephew involved…” For him, the memory was not just fresh, but painful.

I chattered a little about my own theories, the way people far removed from a crime—the people who have not seen it on their local news night after night for months or years; the people who don’t associate it with a town they might have grown up near, a family they might have known—tend to do. I had watched the series with my friend Mary Jo, who grew up in yet another small town in Wisconsin. Somewhere in the middle she excitedly texted one of her friends about the case. This was a woman who, Mary Jo said, always loved to discuss true crime narratives with her, cultivating theories and arguments and doubts. Not this time. Mary Jo’s friend felt connected to the case, as so many small-town Wisconsinites do. It was a story that struck too close to home.

Making a Murderer, which filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos made over the span of a decade, unfolds in ten hour-long episodes, pulling away from the local narrative as it presents, in detail, the inconsistencies and distortions in the widely-accepted version of events. The series begins where most stories of its kind can only hope to end: with an exoneration. In 2003, Steven Avery was released from prison, after serving eighteen years for a brutal sexual assault that the Wisconsin Innocence Project finally helped to prove he did not commit. In the first moments of Making a Murderer, before we can entertain questions about his pathology or menace, we see Steven Avery’s euphoria. His family surrounds him. Everyone is overwhelmed with joy. Backed by a skilled legal team, he brings a civil suit against Manitowoc County, at first seeking damages of $400,000—a figure that eventually climbed to $36 million. Governor Jim Doyle is poised to sign into a law a justice reform bill bearing Avery’s name. Then, less than two years after his release, he is arrested for murder.

Making a Murderer does not present us with the type of crime narrative we’re used to encountering on TV: the forty-five minute template that begins with the beautiful body of the dead girl and ends with the evildoer slapped into cuffs. Whether the story is real or fictional doesn’t matter: both evergreen ratings staples like the CSI and Law & Order franchises and their “true crime” counterparts (Serial Thriller, A Crime to Remember, Southern Fried Homicide) flatten every case into a series of reliable archetypes. If Making a Murderer followed this guide, then we would not begin with Steven Avery. We would begin, instead, with the disappearance of twenty-five-year-old Teresa Halbach, who went missing on Halloween 2005. Working as a photographer for Auto Trader Magazine, her last appointment for that day was with Steven Avery, who was working at his family’s auto salvage yard; she was there to take pictures of a van they were selling. After her disappearance, investigators and volunteers conducted an extensive eight-day search of the property, culminating in their discovery of Teresa Halbach’s remains in a burn barrel on the Avery family’s property. Steven Avery was charged with her murder.

The man who had once been “a living symbol of how a system could unfairly send someone away” was now once again the subject of deep suspicion. “I felt uncomfortable allowing [him] to remain on the street” an investigator told Manitowoc County’s local Fox affiliate during the investigation. The evidence that would link him to Halbach’s death had not yet been tested, but this didn’t seem to matter. Steven Avery was dangerous, and the state’s only mistake had not been in convicting him the first time around, but in allowing him to go free. “It’s this simple,” Representative Mark Gundrum said, “Once Steven Avery is accused of this murder…as much as you mentally want to give the benefit of the doubt to him, it becomes impossible.” Mark Gundrum had been one of the founders of the Avery Task Force, which was intended to prevent wrongful convictions of the kind Avery has suffered. He had been determined to learn from Avery’s story, rather than hide it. If Avery was guilty until proven innocent in Gundrum’s eyes, then what chance did he have with others?