Netflix Continues Its Love Affair with True Crime in The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez
The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Netflix is, for obvious reasons, addicted to true crime stories. So we can likely expect many more series like The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, a very in-depth look at a horrendous case of child abuse in the Antelope Valley that resulted in the death, by torture, of an 8 year old boy in 2013. The details of the case are gruesome and shocking and upsetting, and the filmmakers got very intimate access to many of the key participants. But the case has more than mere shock value - it’s also a look at the systemic failure of LA County and its institutions (the Sheriffs Department & the Department of Children and Family Services, mainly) to do their job and protect this kid.
The case was also noteworthy because the DA charged four County social workers with criminal negligence (the case was eventually thrown out). This idea that institutional failure could result in criminal culpability should probably have been developed more; personally, I think the filmmaker was not really interested in following that thread, having already decided that the social workers were at least partially responsible for Gabriel’s death and deserved to be charged.
The structure of the show is a bit scattershot - the actual events including the investigation, the trial and the sentencing - were pretty straightforward. There was no doubt that Gabriel’s mother and her boyfriend abused him over several months in a truly horrific manner that ultimately caused his death. The only real drama in the court room was whether they would get the death penalty or not. Still, the story unfolds from the point of view of the main participants in a logical and very heart-breaking way. But it’s not quite enough to fill out a 6-episode order, so there are some odd bits and pieces shoe-horned in that don’t really fit, like a segment on using AI to screen for child abuse cases. That one really stuck out as filler.
The show starts to trace the contours of why exactly the County failed Gabriel Fernandez in the way that it did - poking around in how the County contracts out social services to private third party companies, and the shady way in which those contracts may have been awarded. Whenever former LA Times reporter Garrett Therolf is allowed to lead the narrative, it starts to get quite good. But that, along with the bigger legal and moral issues related to charging County workers with criminal negligence, didn’t really get the time they might have and instead the show was filled out with a couple of less interesting detours, such as the use of machine learning to eliminate human error in rooting out child abuse, and some fairly obvious padding. This show might have worked better as, say, a 2-hour episode on Frontline.
