Netflix open to making second season of ‘Making a Murderer’

The 10-part series, “Making a Murderer“, spans over a decade and follows the case of Steven Avery who is convicted of killing photographer Teresa Halbach and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The series has drawn the ire of Nancy Grace, who is convinced of Avery’s guilt. Steven Avery: Guilty Or Framed? A former fiancee of Avery’s, Jodi Stachowski, told HLN this week that he was “a monster” who had threatened to kill her.

Demos and Ricciardi have been accused of downplaying Avery’s history to portray him in a certain way.

The directors of the highly popular Making a Murderer series have defended their controversial documentary, claiming the pieces of evidence they left out weren’t significant.

With the recent media backlash, “it’s now on a national scale that the media are demonizing this man in order to prove his guilt”, said Ricciardi. “We did not set out to convict or exonerate anyone, we set out to examine the criminal justice system and how it’s functioning today”, she said.

Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi came to Nefflix’s TCA day to address their pop culture hit, and were inundated with questions about Steven Avery’s case and revelations in the news that have come up since the show debuted four weeks ago. They also stated that the American Criminal Justice System has some serious problems, which it has to resolve. “We don’t consider this advocacy journalism”, Demos said. And so, we took our cues from the prosecution [and] what they thought was the most compelling evidence.

Many think he was set up by law officials in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who feared they faced a huge financial penalty as Avery planned to sue them for wrongfully sending him to prison for sexual assault.

This show was 10 years in the making.

“We are trying to urge people to think more deeply what the series is about”, Riccardi added, “and making sure our justice system is delivering verdicts we can rely on”.

Producers have also spoken to Avery in the weeks after release, recording the conversations with an eye toward including them in future episodes, but what should we hope for from Making a Murderer Season 2?

Demos and Ricciardi are still recording their phone calls with Avery in case they would be material in new episodes. “He asked the warden and his social worker whether he would be able to see it and his request was denied”.

Just last week, Avery filed two motions alleging violations of due process rights in his prosecution for the 2005 rape and murder of Halbach.

As for how the success of the series in the four weeks since its release may inform programming decisions going forward, Nishimura said Murderer is the first of Netflix’s docuseries that was serialized.