The Best Documentary Series You'll See This Year

The streaming networks love to flood the zone with true crime documentaries because they know that there are a lot of us who will wallow in their salaciousness, even if we ultimately feel bad about it afterward. For some reason, cruise ships are a big deal now, although the summer’s biggest involved a fake pregnancy.

Murder 101, now streaming on Prime Video, smartly pulls in its viewers under the guise of a true-crime investigation, but it turns out to be so much more … and so much better. The three-episode docuseries is set inside Elizabethtown High School in rural Tennessee, where teacher Alex Campbell has turned his sociology class into arguably the coolest year-long, project-based assignment ever. For the last seven years, Mr. Campbell has been using his class to investigate what began as a 1985 cold-case murder and has since evolved into an investigation into a potential series of possibly connected deaths dubbed the Redhead Murders.

These high school kids started out reading newspaper articles from the 1980s and, over the years, they’ve learned how to investigate them. They file FOIA requests; they talk to FBI agents; they go on field trips to crime scenes; they interview the family members of these long-forgotten victims of unsolved cases. They do the work, and then they spend their class time discussing it. It’s a truly hands-on experience where these kids learn valuable skills like how to use evidence to profile suspects, how to request documents, or even something as basic as how to make a professional phone call, which is honestly not something a lot of high school kids know how to do these days.

But Murder 101 is not really about solving these crimes (although Mr. Campbell would really love to do so). It’s about what they learn along the way: about the once unnamed victims — for whom they provide a face and a name — about empathy, and about themselves. In the grand scheme of true-crime docs, the victories are small, but in the lives of these students, they are profound and transformative. Something as small as putting a name and a face to the body of a 15-year-old girl found 40 years ago brings actual tears to the students because it matters.

Some of the students themselves are awkward or perhaps unpopular, but the way this class bonds them is astounding. By the end of the school year, the Prom King is hanging out with a foster kid whose mom is addicted to drugs. The way a quiet kid supports his girlfriend, who uses the confidence from the class to investigate her own mother’s death, is incredibly touching. There is one girl so obsessed with the case that she takes the class two years in a row, and by the time she graduates, she could probably ace a college-level criminal forensics class. Mr. Campbell puts them on the radio, they give interviews to local newspapers, they deliver confident presentations in front of law enforcement, and they piece together evidence like professionals.

And Mr. Campbell: This guy is incredible. I wish every teacher had as much passion for his classroom and his students as he does. He treats these students like colleagues, he listens to them, and he sees them. He is that teacher you remember 40 years later because he’s also that teacher who sets your life on a different trajectory. I am truly in awe of this man.

Murder 101 really is a must-watch, not just for true-crime junkies, but for all those people who (rightfully) complain that true crime doesn’t give enough voice to the victims. And it’s a must-watch for burned-out teachers (or anyone else) who need some inspiration, because this man reminds us what a huge impact a single teacher can have on the lives of his students. He is phenomenal, and so is Murder 101.