Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Conversations With A Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes’ On Netflix, Featuring Some Never-Before-Heard Interviews With Manson And Members Of His “Family”

Conversations With A Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes is a three-part docuseries, directed by Joe Berlinger, that takes a new look at the killings perpetrated by Charles Manson via members of his “Family,” a group of women who were devoted to him and carried out his deadly orders. Via reenactments, interviews with former Manson Family members, and some rarely-if-never-before-heard audio interviews from Manson himself, a picture is painted of Manson’s life and how he managed to get these women to carry out these ritualistic and grisly murders.

Opening Shot: Vintage footage of Los Angeles. Then we hear from Jerry De Rosa, who talks about being a young LAPD patrol officer on August 8, 1969; he was one of the first on the scene to discover the bodies of Sharon Tate and four others in the house rented by Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski.

The Gist: The first episode starts with the infamous murder of Tate, who was eight months pregnant at the time, along with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. The next day, two more grisly deaths were discovered 15 minutes away: Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. In both cases, messages were either scratched onto the bodies or the word “PIGS” was written on the walls in the victim’s blood.

The cruelty of the killings, especially Tate’s, still affect those who came upon the scene 57 years ago, and when authorities captured Manson, people were surprised at his small stature. But they were even more surprised when he was found to be a mastermind who manipulated a group of young women to do his deadly bidding.

Much of the first episode discusses Manson’s rough upbringing and the fact that he spent most of his time in jail, which is where he learned his skills in manipulating people and bending them to his will. Then during the “Summer of Love” in 1967, Manson started attracting young hippie women from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene into his “family.”

Then the narrative shifts to the interactions that Manson, a songwriter, had with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, playing into the vulnerability of Wilson’s forgotten status in that hitmaking group. Wilson introduced him to record producer Terry Melcher, who rented the house Tate was killed in before Polanski. It was Manson and his family’s ultimately futile interactions with Melcher, and Manson’s increasing rants about an upcoming race war to his acid-addled family, that preceded the Tate murder.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Conversations With A Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes is the latest in Berlinger’s Conversations With A Killer series, which has presented interviews with Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Son of Sam. The docuseries Making Manson also boasted never-before-heard interviews with the cultish killer.

Our Take: Unlike other seasons of the Conversations With A Killer series, it feels like calling attention to The Charles Manson Tapes is a bit misleading. If the first episode is any indication, there are lines from Manson sprinkled throughout the narrative. And, indeed, most of it has likely never been heard before, though given the many interviews Manson gave before his death in 2017, it’s likely a lot of what he says in these clips he’s said elsewhere.

Really, the show is more about the women that were a part of the Manson Family, and what they were experiencing back in those days that led them from being average teenagers and young women to cold-blooded killers. The former Family members that Berlinger interviews all seem to have relatively fond memories of the beginnings of the cult, with all of the free love, copious drugs, and the commune that Manson set up at the Spahn Ranch in Los Angeles. They don’t talk about Manson’s charms, or his songwriting ability, in negative terms.

It’s only after he gets spurned by Melcher and kicked out of his house by Wilson that he starts with his rants about a race war, and even though the women interviewed are all horrified by their Svengali’s obvious racism, they don’t quite explain why they stuck with him. The problem with these interviews is that it’s not the first time these women have spoken about their time with Manson, and it won’t be the last.

What rankles us more is the extensive use of reenactments, which at the very least Berlinger points to by using split-screens that show the actor playing a family member with an actual photo of that person during that time period. We’re never fans of reenactments, but it feels like a bit of a desperate move by Berlinger to fill out a three-hour series that doesn’t have enough new material to justify that length.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s certainly fascinating to hear from Manson Family members like Catherine Share and Dianne Lake, but we’ve heard from various family members for decades now.

Sex And Skin: There is talk about the orgies the family used to have at the ranch, but we don’t see anything.

Parting Shot: As we see various Manson pictures flash on the screen, Lake says that “it definitely was in hindsight a lesson on how you can effectively kill somebody.”

Sleeper Star: None that we could find, mainly because most of the rest of the interviewees blend together a bit, especially the “experts” that Berlinger talked to.

Most Pilot-y Line: We sort of get why docuseries have to have give context about what the time period was like, because not everyone watching may have studied up on that time period. But the information about the late-’60s hippie culture that Manson inserted himself into was so basic that it could have been pieced together by news clips instead of talking-head “expert” interviews.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Conversations With A Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes is probably the most frustrating entry in Joe Berlingers docuseries franchise. But the tidbits of new information and new interview material with Manson that he does provide in these three hours are still interesting enough to put up with the annoying reenactments and other narrative misfires.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.