The Crash on Netflix Sparks Intense Debate While Topping Charts

One of the reasons I fear for the future is the same reason I have hope for it. There’s very little barrier to entry to create. As long as you have internet access and a smart phone (or cell service and a smartphone) you can be a streamer, a podcaster, a YouTuber or...make a documentary. 

As the old saying goes though, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

The reason journalism follows a code of ethics and requires leaving as much bias out of it as possible is because with great readership/viewership comes great responsibility, and most people simply won’t do research outside of the two minute video they saw on Tiktok. Critical thinking is more critical than ever, but it’s so easy to keep scrolling and ingest things as fact that are, in fact, harmful.

When I say that The Crash feels like a documentary that maybe should’ve been baked longer, it’s not because it’s missing flow, or has bad cinematography, or anything else like that. It’s because it seems irresponsible. There’s a difference between not getting in the way of the story and letting the story go in one direction, seemingly unfettered by facts.

It’s one thing to present both sides feelings on the matter, but the facts still stand. POTS isn’t even the first medical condition that was proffered as a way to escape a murder charge, as many viewers pointed out that IN the documentary, in “gibberish” she asks her mother if she could just say she had a seizure. Not to mention the way POTS traditionally works, or the fact that Shirilla seems to have had no other instances of POTS while in prison, or ever, according to even friends that defend her. 

Facts indicate the gas pedal was pushed down at 100 percent, with no braking input. And while you can argue “facts” like the tumultousness of a teenage relationship it’s really hard to argue a very specific sudden onset of a very specific chronic disease never mentioned prior and not leaned on later in court that would have her successfully navigate the rest of the road going 100 mph an hour and then losing control BY accelerating at 100 percent (not even partial gas- FULL gas) into a brick wall. 

Yet it feels like Netflix gives Shirilla more than just plausible deniability - between her parents and friends defenses of her character and shrugging it off as “stuff kids do” while talking about the horrible impact it’s had on her, these same people are talking about terrible it is for them to think about going back to those “awful” houses. Which awful houses? The houses of the families of the victims, Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan. 

While it’s uplifting to hear the judge didn’t buy it, it’s frustrating to see that Netflix did. Rather than presenting all the facts of the case, they sensationalized it as a sort of “What if?” scenario that’s totally disingenuous when considering all the facts not included in the documentary, and created a “great story” while feeding into the obvious narcissism of Mackenzie Shirilla herself, who’s literally preening for the camera in prison. Seeing this at the top of the charts and knowing I help put it there by watching doesn’t make me feel good. 

What does though? The absolute onslaught of people going down the “rabbit hole” of researching the case, and pointing out all the things that were left out of the documentary.  Because that’s not just a vapid obsession with a show you watched - that’s research that leads to a full understanding - something Netflix failed to provide in The Crash. 

And while I doubt that Netflix nor the Shirilla family will ever feel remorse for The Crash or the crash as it happened in real life, nor apologize, I think that as the discourse continues and as more and more people fall down the research “rabbit hole” we can hope that they in turn turn to supporting the victims and their families as they try to find justice in an unjust world.