From left: Asante Blackk, Jharrel Jerome, Caleel Harris, Ethan Herisse, and Marquis Rodriguez at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York to promote their Netflix series When They See Us on May 20, 2019.It is unsettling to realize that many people looking for something new to watch on Netflix this week will actually be unfamiliar with what happened in Central Park, New York, on an April night in 1989.
They truly are kids, these boys. The police and the press start calling them “animals” but director and co-writer Ava DuVernay is at pains to present them as what they were on that night. One was 13 years old, one was 16, the others were 14 years old. Korey , Anton , Yusef , Raymond and Kevin were frightened children, bewildered and terrified. From the start, it’s simply implausible that they are guilty.
The four parts of the series shift from the arrest and interrogation of the boys, then to the trials, then to their experiences in prison and, finally, to their exoneration years later. But this is not presented as a story to feel good about in the end. The viewer is not invited to feel satisfaction that justice was done, eventually. It’s one angry drama and scathing. DuVernay wants you to see systemic racism at work and wants you to grasp that nothing has changed since 1989. After all, as the series manages to underline, while the case was unfolding, Donald Trump took out ads in New York newspapers calling for the restoration of the death penalty so that the boys would be executed. Now, he runs the country.