‘No One Saw a Thing’ is haunting
Add “No One Saw a Thing” (11 p.m., Sundance, TV-14) to the growing list of addictive true-crime docuseries. Its story echoes themes from some of Hollywood’s most classic movies, and it features news and interview footage from a generation of TV series and journalists. Its grim subject remains one of America’s great unsolved mysteries.
As the pilot to “No One” makes abundantly clear, Ken Rex McElroy was a no-good, horrible bully of a man. We learn that he raped a 13-year-old and then forced her to marry him so she couldn’t testify against him. He shot the owner of a store over a two-cent piece of candy. He terrorized his neighbors when he wasn’t shooting them.
When he was released on bail in 1981, the town residents of Skidmore, Missouri, decided they’d had enough. According to reports, more than 60 townsfolk surrounded his pickup truck, and moments later he was dead. Then the whole town clammed up.
This rural reticence was like catnip to media far and wide. We see clips of Morley Safer of “60 Minutes” fame interviewing Skidmore residents. The London Times sent a correspondent. Maury Povich shows up too!
And you can understand the fascination. An entire town standing up to a bully offers a kind of inversion of the “High Noon” story. The notion of the brave man standing up for good against evil is a story we tell ourselves. In the midst of seeking courtroom justice in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the righteous character Atticus Finch calmly shoots a rabid dog in the center of town. Somebody had to.
But in “No One,” the notion of frontier justice quickly gives way to something more rancid. McElroy’s public execution gives way to further acts of violence and homicide linked to the town’s vigilante culture and code of silence.
Don’t miss this creepy miniseries, a haunting look at a slice of American culture.
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Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin .tvguy@gmail.com.