This was published 3 years ago
After the Night falls just short of being an Australian Making a Murderer
By Karl Quinn
Compelling as it is, there’s not a lot new in After The Night, a four-part documentary series about Australia's most notorious serial killer. But given it is more than 60 years since Eric Edgar Cooke embarked on his campaign of terror in Perth, and 57 since his arrest, it would be a shock if there were.
The facts are settled, but they're also so far back that – for some of us – this will be their first airing. And for many who were there at the time, it's likely their last chance to bear witness.
Those facts weren't always so established, though. One of the key throughlines of the series is that two men were wrongly convicted of Cooke's crimes, and police knew that was so and covered it up. As Oscar Wilde might have said, "to bang up one wrong chap may be regarded as a misfortune; to do it twice looks like carelessness – or something far worse".
Writer-director Thomas Meadmore has built the vehicle in which we take this tour of a distant past in which people didn't lock the door and often slept on the porch, or even in the garden, if it was hot enough. That was until the night in 1963 when Cooke shot five people, three of them fatally. But it is journalist Estelle Blackburn who steers the story, retracing the route taken in her 1998 book Broken Lives.
Blackburn's detective work is first-rate and for those, like me, who have had only the most fleeting awareness of the story it's worth revisiting. But the device of her recounting the tale while standing in front of a room full of Perth citizens is a little lumpen.
Perth serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, the subject of the Stan documentary series After The Night. Credit: Stan
That's not the only flaw either. Some of the devices Meadmore has employed – such as labelling various interview subjects as "community members" before later revealing their true role in the narrative – sometimes work and sometimes seem ridiculous. I mean, introducing former WA premier Brian Burke as a "community member"? Come on.
At times, After the Night strains to become something more than a tale of crime and corruption. It plays with the idea of a city divided not just by a mighty river but also by a chasm in wealth and class. It was as an act of revenge for being born and bred and bullied on the wrong side of that gulf, it suggests, that Cooke did what he did. It's a reasonable thesis, but it deserves a more thorough examination than it gets here.
Meadmore and Stan clearly aimed to do something here in the vein of Making a Murderer (Netflix) and The Jinx (HBO), which have done so much to redefine the true-crime genre. After the Night tries hard, but it doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off.
For a start, the twists in the tale are already known to anyone familiar with the case (though for us newbies, they're still pretty shocking). There's no unwitting confession in the dunny, no gotcha to turn assumed knowledge on its head. And some of the interviews with those "community members" do little more than pad things out to the desired four-episode length. That said, there is one that is worth the price of admission on its own.
Eric Edgar Cooke (crouching) with Perth detectives.Credit: Stan
Still, guilty as it is of occasional overreach, this is gripping television. It takes us back to a time of innocence, captures the moment it was shattered, and traces the aftershocks that echoed for decades. You might say that, in a sense, we're all still living in the era that came after the night in question.
After the Night streams on Stan, which is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.
Email the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin