DOCUMENTARY SERIES PREMIERE: This new four-part documentary is about the headline-grabbing case of John Wayne Bobbitt and his wife Lorena, who ended up being charged with crimes against each other in separate 1993 trials. He was charged with marital sexual assault, and she was charged with her allegedly retaliatory, and startlingly violent, act of “malicious wounding,” in which she severed his penis. It was a lurid case, covered with tabloid intensity by newspapers and TV alike – but this new examination by director Joshua Rofé, brought to us by the suddenly ubiquitous Jordan Peele, is interested in the bigger picture, and the social context that can come only with a generation of hindsight. I liken this to ESPN’s
O.J.: Made in America, as a documentary that revisits an infamous 1990s story and finds new ways of looking at, and questioning, why it happened, how it was covered by the media, and why different elements of the population – in this case, men and women – often reacted so differently to the same set of facts. For my full review on today’s edition of NPR’s
Fresh Air with Terry Gross, listen to your local public radio station when it airs this afternoon, or, later today,
visit the Fresh Air website.