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A new eight-part Hulu series revisits the story of Amanda Knox, the American college student studying abroad in Italy who was accused of killing her roommate. She was convicted in 2009, acquitted two years later, then convicted again in 2014, then finally cleared for good in 2015. There have been countless articles, a podcast, two major documentaries, and even two books penned by Knox herself about the case.
Roxana Hadadi, TV critic at Vulture, tells KCRW, “In this current era, just of where we are culturally, I think we mostly accept that Amanda Knox was given a raw deal by the media and by the Italian police. … But here we get eight episodes, mostly from her perspective, with looking-back narration that dredges all that up again.”
It’s confusing as to which audience Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is targeting, since so much of the story is public knowledge, Hadidi points out.
The show also suggests people were wrong for making the case a massive media spectacle at the time, and it ironically wants audiences to become obsessed again by watching the weekly episodes, she adds.
As for how the series came about, Hadadi explains that Monica Lewinsky, who became a TV producer, saw Knox mention in an interview that she wanted to turn her story into a television series, so she encouraged her to do so. Both Lewinsky and Knox are executive producers on the series, and Knox co-wrote the final episode with the showrunner.
Lewinsky’s personal story parallels that of Knox as well. Hadadi says, “She also was the victim of this massive international public spectacle. And a few years ago, at this point, she also reclaimed her public image with a television show … called Impeachment. … We get more of Lewinsky’s perspective as this woman who was in a … messy, bad power dynamics relationship with the president. … It changed her perception in the media from this teenage temptress or however she was being painted — as a woman who's taken advantage of … and who was pulled into this massive system that she had no idea how to deal with. And a lot of that formula is within this show.”
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox has two fascinating parts that don’t get enough attention, she highlights. The first: No physical evidence, such as DNA, linked Knox to the crime scene, and she says she was emotionally/physically abused into naming her boss as the perpetrator.
“So her guilt over saying that this man could have been involved in this crime — really drives a portion of the show. Her attempt to make that right with this man, her attempt to understand why she said that — is really interesting. And then at some point in the show, it just gets dropped a little bit. … So it's an interesting progression from presenting her as this American woman who really had no idea what she was doing, to then naming an innocent man as being guilty, and then sending him into the same horrible ordeal that she was in. … I wish the show had dealt more with that.”
The second part: In the final episode, she and the prosecutor (who often smeared her in court and in the media) started exchanging letters to understand each other’s thought processes and actions. “It is fascinating to think: How was Amanda presenting herself to this man who is still a little bit convinced that she was involved in some way? And there's real tension there, but it's constrained mainly to the final episode, when I think you could have built arguably a whole season on that.”
Nowadays, the public has taken a different view of these women, especially through the lens of MeToo. Hadadi says she wonders if this show would’ve succeeded more if it came out a few years ago, “when the hopefulness of MeToo really felt like it was going somewhere.”
She continues, “When I look at the movement, I think a lot about the fact that there are a number of men who were accused of things, who simply went away for a little while, and everything just went back to normal for them. And it just feels odd in 2025, looking around at the media landscape and feeling like we've backslid a bit. And so I don't know what the effort of this show achieves. It just feels, in some ways, out of time in what it's trying to do.” |
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