SHE’S TOUGH. SHE’S wise. She has everything it takes to be conversant and earn respect in the uncouth macho South African man’s world that constituted the SA Police Service in the mid-1990s. She also has what it takes to skip the light fantastic to leap into the abyss that consumes a person with enough emotional trauma to commit murder. Over and over again. Meet Micki Pistorius, South Africa’s first ever full-time profiler. Her story is told in an exquisite new Showmax series, which went live a few weeks ago. Based on her autobiography, Catch Me a Killer (2000), it’s a superb, textured and provocative, but eminently binge-worthy 10-part series, that will set you on fire in your head and your heart and give you a new understanding of what a serial killer actually is.
Close enough to the book in ways that reach deep into your own nexus of where the heart and belief system join up with strong opinions and gut instincts, the work is very well crafted. It veers away from some details to protect the identity of the real children in the story, but the heart and guts and context is retained. With Charlotte Hope in the lead, a quality of production is yielded, evocative of the detective series on Springbok Radio decades ago. This is also like the NBC’s Law & Order or the British itv series, Trial and Retribution, screened in the 1990s on SABC.
Indeed, there is a moment evocative of the invested work of late British actress Helen McCrory, when the horrible reality of the whereabouts of a missing little boy is discovered. Not for the faint of heart, the series is about serial killers. Real ones. Ones who, if you were resident in South Africa from the late 1980s, you would have been aware of in the press. And as such, this series is a period piece as much as it is a detective work. It’s about the messy cynicism that characterised South Africa’s transition into democracy, as much as it is about the cars and clothing fashions of the time.
But above all else is the series’s grand narrative which focuses on the almost tender refining process of discovering the perpetrator through the trail of his habits and idiosyncrasies and tell-tale clues. This series will grip you like the profiler series Wire in the Blood featuring Robson Green might have. And the stories are grisly and hard to watch, made more real with the credibility of Charlotte Hope (though her cigarettes sometimes look so long that they dwarf her and make her look like a child), and her supporting team of cops and Mitchell’s Plain residents.
It’s as good a reason to subscribe to Showmax as you can find. This series is a real winner: gritty and hard-hitting, yet playing into important South African stereotypes, and while fact-based, it doesn’t lose the edge of the proverbial page turner.
- Catch me a Killer is a series of ten episodes, released on a Wednesday, written by Sarah Hooper, Amy Jephta, Oliver Frampton and Jessica Ruston and directed by Brett Michael Innes, Tracey Larcombe and Rene van Rooyen. It is produced by Greig Buckle, James Copp, Robert Naidoo and Brett Wilson and features creative input by Dino Benedetti and Fahema Hendricks (cinematography); Nigel Bunyan, Anna Dick and Claire Pringle (editing); Chiara Molinaro (casting); Warren Gray (production design); and Karlien Seegers (costumes). Performed by Donna Cormack-Thomson, Aidan-Jon Cullinan, Razeen Dada, Foziah Davidson, Charlie Eduardo, Donte Fisher, Charlotte Hope, Connor Isaacs, Kagiso Kuypers, Traverse Le Goff, Vaughn Lucas, Sean Cameron Michael, Carel Nel, Adam Neill, Themba Nofomele, Meghan Oberholzer, Julian Place, Marc Pleass, Albert Pretorius, Sidwell Diamond Ralitsoele, Frank Rautenbach, Cleo Rinkwest, Natalie Robbie, Grant Ross, Ronel Stander, Bjorn Steinbach, Sekoati Sk Tsubane, Ambrose Uren, Candice van Litsenborgh, Chris van Rensburg, Steven John Ward, Gavin Werner, Duncan Wheatley and Ivan Zimmermann, it is on Showmax.