Truth Be Told review – a criminally bad podcast thriller

Octavia Spencer’s cameo playing herself as a diva cast as Harriet Tubman in 30 Rock – 20 lines, five minutes of screen time at most – remains one of the funniest things I have ever seen. If you haven’t seen it, go and do it now. We’ll wait. I want you to have her genius shining in your mind before we turn to Truth Be Told and the tiny fraction of herself there is space for her to deploy in Apple TV+’s latest venture into prestige television drama.

Are you back? Brilliant, wasn’t it? OK, then. To work.

Spencer plays Poppy Parnell, whose cartoonish name is entirely at odds with her character and the show’s content and is emblematic of the lack of cohesion in the entire thing. Poppy is a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist turned successful true crime podcaster. She made her name two decades ago by writing a series of articles about a high-profile murder suspect named Warren Cave (played by a particularly growly Aaron Paul); 19 years ago, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing an author, Chuck Buhrman. His conviction was partly down to one of Buhrman’s twin daughters (Laney, played by the perennially excellent Lizzy Caplan) testifying against him and partly because of Poppy’s pops at him in print.

Truth Be Told opens with Poppy discovering that Laney may have been coached to give false testimony. This is her chance to put right a possible miscarriage of justice.

Was Laney lying? She has grown up to be a death doula (an ancient spiritual practice that, in its modern form, appears to involve distracting young men from their bereavement by shagging them), which suggests something is amiss. But is it a reaction to early bereavement or has the testifying twin become troubled because of the tugs of untruth tormenting her mind over time? And why is she estranged from Josie, t’other twin? Who, by the way, now has blond hair and an English accent, and is engaged to a rich man with a young son she is awfly keen to get into a good school. You go, reinvented girl also played by Caplan! The rift between them seems to go deep, though we inch towards an understanding agonisingly slowly.

Poppy sets to work investigating the case anew, even after she visits Cave in prison and discovers that he has become, as skinny white kids tend to when dropped into a carceral hellscape with no possibility of parole nor much of survival, a skinhead member of the Aryan Brotherhood. She lays down the “no white supremacist talk to me” law very firmly, and he agrees to allow her to reinvestigate and fling everything up on the internet as she goes. The Brotherhood seem set fair to be unimpressed by this decision.

After that a lot happens – Poppy pins up pictures, pursues people, prattles on her podcast and purses her lips at those, including her husband, who try to thwart her quest for justice – but the plot moves at glacial pace. The four episodes provided for review (there are 10 in total) contain a lot of information: about Poppy coming from a tougher background than her current life suggests, her father (Ron Cephas Jones) possibly having dementia as well as ties to the criminal underworld and a resentment of her readiness to help a neo-Nazi however unjustly accused, her ex-lover Marcus (Mekhi Phifer) being back on the scene and now, handily, a PI. They often gesture towards larger issues, such as race and class, the conflict between family loyalty and serving higher causes and wanting to grapple with guilt and conscience. But the show doesn’t seem to know how and so – some great set-pieces with her scene-stealing sisters (Haneefah Wood and Tracie Thoms) notwithstanding – ends up treading water when at the very least, even if it can’t transfigure its parts into a sum, it should be getting on with the story.

By nearly halfway through the series we have had only a set of decidedly unoriginal revelations revealed in a deeply pedestrian manner. You can feel the on-screen talent longing to let rip, but the script and the structure and the sense just aren’t there. It has fragments of Making a Murderer and Serial as well as the novel upon which it is based in its DNA, and you can see why executive producer Reese Witherspoon is on board, but it doesn’t succeed in becoming its own, fully articulated thing. Maybe things improve in the second half. If not, there’s always five golden minutes of 30 Rock instead.