What Jennifer Didn’t Do
Why it’s dangerous for Netflix to churn out true crime docs on the cheap
It’s my own fault Netflix keeps pummeling me with titles like The Parachute Murder Plot, Lover Stalker Killer and Till Murder Do Us Part; I went on a true crime bender during Covid and I’ve never been as genre-consistent before or since.
While Netflix hopes I’ll finish Island of the Sea Wolves, and it periodically tries to rope me into a superhero franchise, I really can’t blame it for mainly seizing on my Golden State Killer binge, my string of cult crime docs, and the time I tried to teach my 97-year-old nearly blind grandma over the phone how to use my iPad but she kept hitting the wrong button and muttering, “Ted Bundy Tapes? I don’t want Ted Bundy Tapes! Where’s The Crown . . . ?”
So yeah, I probably deserve this torrent of true crime — like the many women who constitute 80% of the genre’s followers.
But I resisted What Jennifer Did for weeks until I finally caved; and since I can’t un-watch it, I decided to investigate why I’m increasingly finding it — and docs like it — so culturally disturbing.
Andrew Chamings sums the film up in his SF Gate article:
“‘What Jennifer Did’ is mediocre in almost every way, but nefariously unethical in another. The 90-minute streaming doc concerns the tragic story of the Pan family. In 2010, Jennifer Pan, a 24-year-old Vietnamese Canadian woman living with her family near Toronto, arranged to have her parents killed.”
The film unfolds like this:
- A 911 call is made by 24-year-old Jennifer Pan — in hysterics — explaining that some men broke in and shot both her parents.
- She’s interviewed as the third victim, and only witness, while her father survives in an induced coma.
- Her initial interview evades the complexities of her relationship with her parents and pot-dealing ex-boyfriend, raising suspicion about who might’ve been the target of this “random” attack. Meanwhile, the circumstances of the break-in seem fishy, including Jennifer’s ability to phone the cops while bound by ropes.
- Later, Jennifer reveals she’s a serial liar who convinced her parents for four years that she’d attended and graduated from university with a pharmacy degree. They banned her from seeing her ex, kept her under strict watch, and told her if she didn’t like it she could leave.
- Jennifer’s father wakes up and suspects she’s involved in the “hit.” A warrant on her phone leads to evidence supporting this.
Chamings’ ethics grievance is with two sloppily doctored photos used throughout the film, AI-warping Jennifer’s fingers and teeth. The exec producer’s defense is that they’ve been anonymised to protect the photographer. Chamings argues this is at best lazy, in the mid-range misleading about the events of the case (“are long fingers how she got out of the ropes?!”), and at worst ethically manipulative considering such weird images were used to draw attention to the show.
I did pause to stare at her teeth for a long time. Long enough for Netflix to re-suggest Who Killed Jill Dando again. So he may have a point.
But what I found even more sinister was the film’s lack of perspective. Neither Jennifer, nor her ex-boyfriend, nor any of the accomplices, nor her surviving father participated in the film. Her mother’s friend was briefly interviewed (but clearly out of touch with events), as well as a frenemy of Jennifer’s who indicated she was one of the dumber kids at school, much to the distress of her ambitious immigrant parents. Why these people, I have no idea.
Beyond that, the documentary largely is down to police interview footage and follow-up conversations with the squad. Basically a live police report. But when it comes to motive, there’s some musing about middle class inheritance and mild suggestion that the stresses of tiger parenting may have pushed Jennifer overboard, but sympathy for her victims seems to cut further explorations short. And I can empathize with that sympathy. But instead of diving deep, the film’s final lines generalize the bleak reality of all postmortem policing: “This was not going to help bring anybody back, but I think we did right by Mrs. Pan, and we did right by Mr. Pan.”
So the cops did their jobs. But what did the documentary do?
It warped reality.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime recently released its Global Study on Homicide 2023 report: “Men account for 81 per cent of the victims of intentional homicide globally, and around 90 per cent of the suspects.”
In Canada, where the crime took place, homicide rates were up 9% year over year in 2022, but according to Statistics Canada, “Homicides remain a rare event in Canada, accounting for less than 0.2 per cent of all police-reported violent crimes.” Today, Canada continues to have among the lowest homicide rates in the world.
Among murderers, as a young, Canadian female with zero criminal record, Jennifer Pan is an absolute statistical unicorn anomaly.
Shockingly, the documentary does almost nothing to explore this.
Like most women who constitute the fans of the genre, I don’t watch true crime to be tortured. Psychology Today suspects it’s because we want to get into the heads of often-male murderers both for defensive learning purposes and because then, “he may not be so terrifying after all.” Perhaps.
But earlier this year, Netflix served me another true crime doc which suggests something else. American Nightmare recalls the case of Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins, whose brutal California kidnapping became a media and police circus stirring mass paranoia that perhaps she was faking it vis a vis the hit film Gone Girl. Spoiler alert: she was not faking it. Huskins for years faced scathing allegations — legal, public, personal — until finally a cop with fresh perspective on DNA and a willingness to relook at her case proved both she and Quinn were telling the truth.
Leila Latif says in her Guardian article, “What elevates this documentary above the normal schlocky true crime fare is how it makes the true crime audience complicit in the media storm in which Quinn and Huskins found themselves.” American Nightmare is, at its heart, a commentary about the power of public opinion—but it’s disguised as a true crime doc, and that’s what makes it so utterly brilliant.
We need films like American Nightmare to draw us in and show us about what we’re capable of as a highly organized, outspoken (and yes, masculine-driven) species. I think my consumption of true crime is less about psychopaths and more about understanding the context of extreme acts in our times; in my opinion, this is true crime at its best.
But What Jennifer Did is not such a film — nor are countless recent others — and I think I know why.
During Covid, I wasn’t alone. Demand for true crime spiked in 2021, vastly outperforming other docs. But today, we’re in the aftermath of industry strikes, with an over-saturation of content still looming and post-strike production deals declining as industry budgets reshuffle and reassess how to keep the lights on. What‘s left seems to be a half-hearted effort by streamers to keep plugging a once flourishing subgenre — but without “over”-investing in quality.
American Nightmare aside, many of the greatest true crime docs in recent history — The Jinx, The Keepers, and Tell Me Who I Am — were produced prior to the true crime streamer boom of 2021, when production wasn’t driven by low-budget genre demand — but by passionate storytelling.
And there’s real danger when we lose that passion. Because these days, true crime can yield true power.
In the 21st century, documentarians are increasingly proving to be impactful witnesses to the very cases they cover — and their films are rapidly being accepted as public record. For better or worse, quite a few have been credited with influencing re-openings and reevaluations of the cases they cover, as with the Serial podcast for Adnon Syed; Making a Murderer for Brendan Dassey and Steven Avery; and The Staircase for Michael Peterson. Some to significant effect. So in consuming true crime documentaries, we the audience have become more complicit than ever. Our viewership validates and aids in the social and legal weight films carry — whether or not it’s the filmmaker’s intention, and whether or not their filmmaking is responsible. So as much as documentarians should mind what they’re creating, we should mind what we’re watching.
The problem with What Jennifer Did is that her story didn’t really get told, and it’s unlikely to get another second chance anytime soon. Which is unfortunate because it could be important to understand why a young woman like Jennifer Pan is such a statistical anomaly — and speaking from within a majority female audience, I suspect I’m not alone. But furthermore, Jennifer’s legal case is still in limbo. She and her accomplices were initially convicted of first-degree and attempted murder, and sentenced to life in prison — but these have since been overturned and a retrial is on the horizon. What Jennifer Did did not do was shed real light on a sensitive ongoing story, one with serious consequences for all involved.
A future documentarian will be wise to ask bigger questions. She’ll gradually gain the trust of Jennifer, her accomplices, and her family. She’ll get the important interviews. She’ll explore not only the details of the case, but perhaps also its impact on the Pan’s community — a diverse, safe and thriving town in Canada — and on perspectives of exceedingly rare female criminals via the lens of professional forensic psychologists who study them. She’ll work out what’s meaningful in Jennifer’s story. And despite timelines and budgets, she’ll wait and listen and learn, because she knows that whatever she has to say could have a real impact on the outcome of Jennifer Pan’s case and on how audiences participate in it.
She’ll be patient enough to tell a story worth telling. And until it’s ready, she’ll do what responsible documentarians throughout history have always done and so many today fail to do: she simply won’t tell it.
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