Steve on TV: Marietta darling JonBenét Ramsey’s new case on Netflix

Steve Murray’s monthly musings on TV in Atlanta and beyond.

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Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey

If character is destiny, sometimes so is a face. John Ramsey has an unfortunate one for someone embroiled in one of the last sensationalized murder investigations of the 20th century. It’s biological. His eyes have a natural set to them that looks like an amused crinkle. He always seems to be smiling in a way that can come off as smug, mocking. It’s a punchable face. 

Combine that with his wealth and privilege, and Ramsey must have seemed the sort of guy cops would love to pin a crime on. That was even before the photos and video tapes leaked of his rhinestoned, singing, sashaying baby daughter JonBenét after she was found murdered the day after Christmas in 1996. Those toddler pageant images were swooped on by the 24/7 networks and all the daily papers, including the AJC, where I used to work.

The AJC’s interest made sense. Ramsey had built his successful business in Atlanta, and JonBenét was born in Marietta. The family at the time of the murder was living in Boulder, Colorado, in a cozy but vast brick house that CNN soon made very familiar on our TV screens. Netflix’s three-part documentary series Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey takes us back to the national obsession and rush to judgment that was abetted by the media but, especially by the Boulder police.

That’s the main angle of the new doc: Journalists who covered the case recall how they followed the lead of law enforcement, insinuating to the world that someone in the family was the murderer. (John, mother Patsy and older brother Burke all took turns in the glare of suspicion.) The series is pretty convincing in its thesis that police may have wasted time finding the real killer while pinning it on the Ramseys. But the show is also something of a come-on. It hooks you, then drops you flat in the last episode, trotting out suspects (including uber-creep John Mark Karr, who made a false confession) but laying plausible blame at no one’s feet. (Well, it is called Cold Case …) 

Regardless of whodunnit, the documentary is both a time capsule and a glimpse into the coming millennium. A sensation even before the internet infiltrated everyone’s office, home and phone, the Ramsey case is a chilling oracle of the ways our nation has become driven by obsession, sexualized conspiracy theories, rumors and unpunished lies in the quarter century since. 

As awful as the murder was, the documentary series makes us look back at a time that now seems as innocent as the more salacious pundits believed little JonBenét wasn’t. If nothing else, Cold Case restores JonBenét’s identity, relentlessly smudged at the time, as a vivacious little 6-year-old girl who didn’t deserve such a brutally short life.  

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Our Little Secret 

All hail the Christmas miracle bestowed on Lindsay Lohan by Netflix. In Our Little Secret, the third in her film deal with the streamer, she double-dips into the yuletide punch bowl she first sampled in 2022’s Falling for Christmas. The Atlanta-filmed Secret isn’t a good movie, but it does what it’s supposed to do: rehabilitate Lohan as a grown-up good girl and stock Netflix’s shelves with more stuff to help us through the holidays. 

Lohan plays Avery, who goes with boyfriend Cameron (Jon Rudnitsky) to spend Christmas week at the home of his family. She hasn’t met any of them, and her immediate, glittering nemesis is Broadway’s original Glinda, Kristin Chenoweth, as Cam’s perfectionist mom. An even bigger challenge arrives in the form of Logan (Ian Harding), a guy Avery grew up with in Peachtree City and hasn’t seen for years. So what’s their big secret? 

It’s not the screwiest of screwball comedy complications. Instead it’s lame, tame and dated. See, Avery and Logan were an item when they were younger, before she broke up with him to take a job in London. On seeing each other cold in Cam’s family’s living room, they pretend they’re meeting for the very first time. Um, why? Well, they’re worried about — horrors — their prospective in-laws having to imagine them, you know, f*&%ing. (Like I said: lame, tame and dated.) It’s not much of a problem. The truth is, Lohan and Harding have a friendly chemistry, but it’s hard to imagine them in an erotic entanglement.  

But, hey, people watch these movies not for innovative scripts or filmmaking but for the ho-blah-ho comforts of the season. Secret delivers that well enough. The cast includes TV-friendly faces that wrap around you like a warm blanket. Here, they’re SNL’s Tim Meadows and Judy Reyes of Scrubs as friends of Cam’s family. (A Black business partner and his charming-but-firm wife have replaced Sassy Gay Friend as a sidekick trope in these kinds of flicks.) 

For the most part, Secret is too timid to be surprising at all. When an underage family member susses out Avery and Logan’s secret, for instance, he blackmails them into buying him … booze. (Lame, tame, dated.) Still, Chenoweth gives good power-blonde energy, though Hailey DeDominicis’ screenplay doesn’t give her much to spin. (The script has no undercurrents of interest; there’s no text; it’s all on the surface.) 

But the scene in which all the secrets and evasions come pouring out in the family living room has the bonkers momentum of a decent, classic screwball. And Decatur Square looks nice when the characters go shopping there, under snow falling from a piercing blue sky. 

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The Piano Lesson 

The Piano Lesson was one of the great August Wilson plays Kenny Leon staged at the Alliance Theatre when he was its artistic director. Though Wilson’s plays were mainly set in Pittsburgh, they were a gift to our own city and its biggest professional theater, which struggled at bringing along hidebound Anglo Saxon subscribers as it transformed into an institution of stories that reflected Atlanta’s diverse faces.

That’s one Atlanta connection the Netflix film version of Piano has. Another is that it was shot here and in Canton, as well as in Pittsburgh. And it stars Atlanta actor Danielle Deadwyler as the main female character, the play’s moral force. 

In this mix of heartfelt and hokum, Deadwyler plays Berniece, a stern single mom whose daily routine in Pittsburgh gets rattled by the arrival from Mississippi of her big-talking brother Boy Willie (John David Washington). Carting a truckload of watermelons to sell, he wants to raise money to buy a patch of Delta land once owned by the racist White farmer, Sutter, who recently died. To that purpose, Boy Willie also wants to sell the family piano he and Berniece co-own, an instrument freighted with history: The faces and stories of their enslaved ancestors are carved on its front. Berniece refuses to sell, and Sutter’s image starts appearing upstairs, making the ghosts of the past quite literal. Like I said, hokum. But it’s hokum that’s carried along by Wilson’s musical, muscular dialogue. 

Handsome but wooden in his earlier films (Tenet, BlacKkKlansman), Washington has had a hard time shaking the Nepo Baby label. (He and director Malcolm, who does a decent but uninspired job, are sons of Denzel, one of the film’s producers.) Here, the actor does his best work and shows real growth … but it’s hard to phone in Wilson’s lines.

Deadwyler is terrific, but that’s a given. However, she comes in a little hot in a way that doesn’t let her grow much in the role. Don’t get me wrong: She both elevates and grounds every project she’s in. It’s just that I’m starting to see some repeated beats and gestures that feel familiar from her previous work. Is it selfish to want somebody who’s great to always be getting better? Maybe, but it’s Christmastime and a boy can hope.  

The movie’s real stealth performers are Samuel L. Jackson as Berniece and Boy Willie’s wise, watchful uncle, and especially Ray Fisher as their up-from-the-South friend, Lymon. Fisher comes on as the sleepy-eyed butt of everybody’s country-boy jokes but turns out to have a few unexpected moves. 

Also on Netflix, there’s the special Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was … Shot in Atlanta, it has Foxx telling an audience about his experience falling gravely ill and recovering in our city. But based on the few minutes I was able to stomach, it’s only for Foxx fans who love him even a little bit as much as he seems to love himself.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous column here.