[imagesource: Showtime]

Having powered through Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, mostly with my mouth open in shock, I’ve been on the lookout for another true-crime-styled docuseries.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which unpacks the story behind how the Golden State Killer was eventually caught, is on the list, which I will get to once I’ve finished Netflix’s Trial by Media.

Thanks for coming with me on this journey into my TV watching habits, but let’s get down to business, and the five-part docuseries, Outcry.

In July 2013, a four-year-old boy in Williamson county, a suburb outside of Austin, Texas, told his parents that he had been sexually assaulted by a high schooler he called Greg.

After the police became involved, Greg Kelley, then 17 and the star of the Leander high school football team, was promptly arrested.

The Guardian, which calls it “the most surprising docuseries of the summer”, takes it from here:

It seemed like a clearcut case – Kelley was living with a friend’s family to maintain residency in the district, at a house which also hosted the in-home daycare center attended by a four-year-old. Soon, police reported another outcry by another four-year-old daycare attendee. Kelley maintained his innocence but was convicted in 2014, aged 18, of two counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child, and sentenced to 25 years in prison without possibility of parole.

But as documented in Showtime’s five-part series Outcry, the case was hardly an open-and-shut deal. Following his conviction, hundreds of people, particularly fellow high schoolers, in Leander and neighboring Cedar Park rallied around Kelley’s innocence – not the response you’d necessarily expect for someone accused of sexually assaulting small children, no matter how high their profile in the quasi-religion that is Texas high school football.

What makes this docuseries so surprising is that events unfold in real-time, with the series shot over three years from 2017 onwards, as new developments were breaking.

This means that many of those closely involved with the case experience major twists and shocking news on camera, leading to a “hyper-local yet deeply concerning saga of prosecutorial misconduct and a botched investigation, a confusing conviction process and the misunderstood psychology of child confessions”.

All in all, it is going to be a rollercoaster ride:

An episode of Outcry airs each week on Showtime in the US, with the first going out this Sunday.

You can watch that first episode after it airs on this YouTube channel for free.

[source:guardian]