Sasha Reid and the midnight order It sounds like the title of a mystery novel series or a Netflix police procedural, but it’s actually a Freeform documentary series about a Canadian profiler and a group of young women who help her investigate unsolved murders.
SASHA REID AND THE ORDER OF MIDNIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening shot: As we watch scenes of a snowy river in Ontario, we hear a woman talking on the phone about how she began to think her husband was a serial killer. Dr. Sasha Reid opens a large, double-folded piece of cardboard sent to her by the caller.
The essence: Dr. Sasha Reid has a PhD in developmental psychology and teaches at the University of Calgary, where she plans to pursue a law degree. As she mentions, she has created the largest database of serial killers in the world. She has analyzed the profiles of hundreds of killers, as well as their victims, and has used data science to create a much more complex picture of these killers than law enforcement has ever seen. What she wants to do is help identify the killers of victims whose cases have gone cold or have been largely ignored, such as Indigenous women across Canada.
To help her with her investigations, she has a group of six women who call themselves The Midnight Order: Anjali Arora, Marina Jarenova, Ayah Ellithy, Sasha Reid, Florence Tang, Hana Georgoulis and Hasti Pourriahi. They come from perse backgrounds; some are native Canadians, others have come to the country from places like Iran. They all have a keen interest in what Reid does and bring different specialties to the group.
The first investigation comes when the aforementioned woman, whom Reid calls “Veronica,” thinks her husband, who goes by the name “Archie,” is a serial killer. The woman who contacted Reid believes a cluster of unsolved murders of young women in and around London, Ontario, that began in the early 1980s, could be his victims.
What shows will it remind you of? Sasha Reid and the midnight order It has the feel of another unsolved case docuseries, Unsolved mysteriesAlso remember MindhunterDavid Fincher’s two-season miracle about the formation of the FBI’s serial crime unit.
Our opinion: There are parts of Sasha Reid and the midnight orderdirected by Nancy Schwartzman, with Maija Norris as showrunner, are fascinating to watch, but there are also plenty of things about the viewing experience that are frustrating. Most of the frustrating parts have to do with the way the show is presented, with Schwartzman and Norris determined to make the show look and feel like a fictional (we won’t say “scripted,” for good reasons) police procedural you might see on Freeform or somewhere similar.
There are times when Reid and his “Order of Midnight” seem to be doing things more for the sake of spectacle than actually getting to a point that will bring them closer to identifying the killer of those women from 40 years ago. In one scene, Reid and three members of the group venture out to the river where one of the bodies was found, just to get an “idea” of what the killer might be thinking. Sure, that might have helped. But Reid is the oldest of the group and is only 35; going to the scene of a crime that happened years before any of them were born to try to get a sense of what the killer did seems more like they’re doing it for the cameras.
Some members of the group interview law enforcement officers, and these interviews do not seem to provide them with any new information. In fact, some of the interviews seem semi-rehearsed.
One of the things we wonder about is whether this data collection that Reid and his group put together leads to finding concrete evidence that can link a person to these unsolved cases. After all, even with the data science that Reid uses to find potential suspects, law enforcement can’t act on it unless it leads to hard evidence.
An interesting interview was with a local police detective who worked cold cases; he says that they sometimes save the DNA evidence they have left so that it doesn’t run out, despite technological improvements. The idea isn’t to take advantage of new technology if you don’t have a solid lead that the technology can link the evidence to. Hopefully that idea will be explored further, because Reid and the group really need to create those solid leads to give law enforcement the impetus to re-examine physical evidence.
Sex and skin: None.
Parting shot: The group texts each other about a drawing that one of the victims’ sisters showed them; it matches the sketch of “Archie” that “Veronica” sent them.
Sleeping Star: All the women of the Order of Midnight are highly intelligent and dedicated to uncovering the truth.
Pilot’s most typical phrase: We’re not sure why, but there were a lot of blurry photos in our screening video, even though those photos were part of newspaper clippings and internet articles. Did the producers not get permission to show those photos?
Our calling: PASS IT ON. Sasha Reid and the midnight order The script doesn’t need to be very elaborate to communicate what Reid and his team do to help solve cold cases. But if you can get past that level of detail, there’s a lot of interesting stuff to see.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting, and technology, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV addict. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and elsewhere.
