Another grating element is the way the story is overlaid by the kind of irreverent millennial narration, from Van Patten as Knox, which recalls other recent true-crime dramatisations such as Inventing Anna or Apple Cider Vinegar. In trying to ape the style of these other “lighter” shows, it takes away from the severity of the actual case in hand.
The wave of ‘reclaiming’ narratives
However, after the gross injustice of being framed for a murder you didn’t commit, it’s understandable why Knox would want to put the story straight once more – and “reclaim” her narrative. This is something which a host of pop culture documentaries, podcasts and dramatisations have purportedly helped famous women to do over the past decade, casting a new light on ’90s female celebrities and figures like Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Monica Lewinsky and Tonya Harding, who were caught up in scandals that saw them demonised in a public forum.
Interestingly, Lewinsky is an executive producer on The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, alongside Knox herself, having co-produced Ryan Murphy’s 2021 miniseries Impeachment: American Crime Story, which retold the story of her affair with the then US President Bill Clinton from her perspective. Some of these projects, like the Lewinsky drama, have been done with the involvement of their subjects, and some, like Hulu’s Pam and Tommy, about Pamela Anderson’s sex tape scandal, have been done without. However as Jessica Bennett asked in The New York Times of this whole sub-genre of “reclaiming the narrative” productions: “It is no secret that humans love consuming spectacle – and we doubly love a spectacle when it involves women and sex. But at what point does the fictional depiction of that spectacle, and our viewing of it, become just as bad as watching it in the first place?”
Knox has said that the series is intended to highlight that the real killer was Guede, which is valid point – given that Guede was given a “fast track” trial and convicted for the murder out of the public eye, without being subjected to the same intense media scrutiny as Knox. She recently told Newsweek: “No one cares about this guy who actually murdered my roommate. I think that is so indicative of what was going on at the time, and has always been going on with this case, [which] is the idea that it wasn’t ever even really about Meredith… The truth of what happened to her, and the truth of the person who actually did it, got completely lost for the sake of a scandalous story.”