On the surface, Last Call looks like dozens of other true-crime series. All the familiar visual language is in place: footage of recreated scenes, lots of talking heads, timelines that flash across the screen, piles of images of documents and police evidence. Most true-crime docuseries use this kind of material to add up to proof of guilt or draw out the pleasurable dissatisfaction of a mystery that hasn’t yet been solved. Last Call still does those things, but with a marked lack of fanfare. Given the course of a story that’s subtitled When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, it’s necessary to identify a killer, to consider that person’s life and the details of their crimes, and yet Last Call treats those narrative necessities with an almost reluctant eye. Yes, these things are important, but other things matter more.
Directed by Anthony Caronna and adapted from the book of the same name by Elon Green, Last Call makes a suggestive companion to the recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry,†which casts a sardonic eye on the true-crime genre as it’s usually deployed: the promise of careful sensitivity and the end result of naked sensationalism. As a story about a serial killer who murdered several queer men in New York in the early ’90s, Last Call could very easily have been exactly the kind of true crime “Loch Henry†sneers at, a dime-a-dozen streaming thriller full of shock and disgust and obsession with a killer’s mind. But it’s more interested in the lives of the victims than the killer, more attentive to history and cultural context than to repetition of violent details, and vastly more curious about systems of bias than individual criminality. It’s gentle and careful and immensely loving, even when it’s also full of palpable fury — everything true crime so rarely understands how to be.
The series’s four episodes, which roll out Sunday nights on HBO and Max beginning July 9, spend significant time with victims’ families, friends, and lovers, and their accounts become multifaceted portraits of who these men were. Because they were queer men, and because not all of them were out to everyone in their lives, the varied, overlapping perspectives help resist any simplistic reading of who they were and how they’re remembered. Thomas Mulcahy’s daughter talks about how loving he was, and about the pain of losing him in young adulthood, just as she was beginning to know him as a person beyond just her father. Peter Anderson’s lover describes their yearslong relationship and how rich it was, and what it was like to keep their sexuality a secret for all that time.
Last Call’s humanizing impulse permeates the entire series, but it’s most striking in the treatment of Anthony Marrero, a Puerto Rican sex worker whose story stands in contrast to the killer’s other white, more economically privileged victims. Last Call includes some of the contemporaneous coverage of Marrero’s murder, which was dismissive at best and occasionally almost glib. Rather than stopping there, though, with an uninterrogated pat on the back at how far we’ve come, Last Call digs in with lengthy interviews with Marerro’s brother, who still can’t acknowledge that part of Marrero’s life, with a friend who knew Marrero well, and with Marrero’s great-nephew, who’s trying to push back against the way Marrero was erased within his own family. The result is not trying to be — cannot be — an exhaustive picture of who Marrero was. But it makes him a person, memorable and complicated, someone loyal, with an incredible capacity to charm, a man with a sense of style, a person not easily reducible to a homophobic headline or buried on a list of more white-coded names.
Last Call does this for as many of the victims as it can, with as much attention to multiple areas of the person’s life as it can possibly provide. At the same time, the series does tell the story of the investigation into who killed these men through interviews with law-enforcement officers, but many then and some even now struggle with how to find a killer who targeted a community of gay men. In one especially telling interview early in the series, we hear the director, off camera, ask two former Pennsylvania state police officers who investigated one of the murders if there are any questions the production team should have asked but did not. “Yeah,†one of them replies, asking of this docuseries, “Why is the emphasis on the gay part?â€
Again and again, Last Call finds ways to answer that question. The most direct answer is simply that if police officers can’t see gay life, they’ll inevitably fail to see the details of these crimes. Beyond people who knew the victims, the most prominent voices in Last Call are activists who struggled to illuminate and eradicate anti-gay violence in the city during the ’80s and ’90s, especially New York Anti-Violence Project members Bea Hanson and Matt Foreman. Because of their presence in the docuseries, Last Call can continually return to emphasize New York City as a site of violence but also a crucial haven for gay life. As much as anything, Last Call is about the ways each of these men had joy in their life and how tragic it is that their lives ended in violence.
The most surprising thing about watching Last Call is that it is deeply, intensely sad, but that surprise is odd. Surely all documentaries about murder are sad. Why should this one be different? It is, though, and that surprise comes from the slow-rolling realization of how rare it is to come away from a true-crime production with feelings of grief instead of shock or disbelief or giddy, thrilled disgust. There’s another sadness, too: More true-crime stories could be told this way and aren’t. It’s not a loss on the same scale as the murders of Peter Anderson, Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony Marrero, and Michael Sakara, but it’s a loss all the same.