Well, at least it was only three episodes. I know that’s not necessarily the most reassuring way of convincing you to watch a show, but these days, sometimes reminding an audience that something is appropriately lengthed instead of being drawn out for ulterior motives is oddly refreshing. The Witness could have been some 10-episode limited series where every aspect and detail of the case was spread out and beleaguered, with additional material packed in for dramatic effect until the passage of time slowed considerably and we spent a lifetime in a story that is rather simple for what it is. Instead, The Witness tells the true story of Alex Hanscombe, who was just shy of 3 years old when he witnessed the brutal murder of his mother, Rachel Nickell, on Wimbledon Common in 1992. Alex became the only witness to the crime, which was slightly controversial considering his age and the question of how a child that young could possibly identify the person responsible for such a gruesome act.

As some of the child psychologists involved point out, Alex didn’t necessarily have the experience, vocabulary, or emotional understanding to describe what he had seen or how he felt about it. Jahsaiah Williams plays Alex as a young child, while Max Fincham takes over as the teenage Alex, but much of the series rests on Jordan Bolger as Alex’s father, André Hanscombe. André suddenly finds himself raising his son alone while also trying to protect him from the police investigation, psychologists, and an increasingly aggressive media circus. The police desperately want information from Alex that might meaningfully contribute to the search for the man who murdered his mother, particularly when there’s the possibility that whoever committed this crime could be connected to others or could strike again.

Of course, since 1992 we’ve seen this basic setup used in other films and television shows, where there’s a child witness at the heart of something and it’s up to an adult to protect them from those who might do them harm as the lone witness. It’s unclear how many people who followed the case might have been inspired by it. John Grisham’s The Client, which features a teenage boy and his younger brother as witnesses to a shocking event, may have come straight from Grisham’s mind. But another film from around that same period, Silent Fall, starring Richard Dreyfuss and centered around a traumatized young boy who witnessed his parents’ murder, certainly makes the comparison difficult to ignore. Regardless of whether these stories were actually inspired by Alex Hanscombe, this particular narrative device became familiar enough that watching the true story now oddly feels like watching something we’ve already seen fictionalized.

The Witness works and doesn’t at the same time, for reasons that are both understandable and frustrating. What we get is a fairly honest portrayal of what happened, with André working exceptionally hard to keep Alex safe and offer him some semblance of a normal childhood in the face of growing public scrutiny surrounding this shocking murder. Jordan Bolger is quite good at carrying that emotional weight because André isn’t simply trying to solve his partner’s murder. He’s a father realizing that his son is being asked to repeatedly revisit something he may not even possess the ability to fully process. The police want answers, the media wants a story, psychologists are trying to understand what Alex remembers, and André is the one person whose primary responsibility is making sure Alex survives all of it.

The case doesn’t resolve easily, either. Years pass, with Alex growing up away from the public eye as much as possible but still aware that somewhere out there is the killer he was unable to verbalize at such a young age, potentially still walking around because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict anyone. There’s always a tease that somebody might have seen something leading to somebody who might have been the killer, only for another avenue to collapse. Eventually, within the three-episode framework, you will find out who the killer was because in the real world Robert Napper was ultimately identified and brought to justice. It may not necessarily be the most cinematically rewarding experience when you finally learn the truth and see the reactions surrounding it, but that’s what happens when you base something on a true story and resist the temptation to manufacture a more satisfying conclusion.

That commitment to avoiding sensationalism is both one of The Witness’s strengths and, strangely, one of my disappointments with it. We’ve seen filmmakers take the idea of child witnesses and place them at the center of far more engaging thrillers. So which is better? A fictional story that takes inspiration from something real and turns the dial up, or a true story translated into an approximation of what really happened? Personally, I tend to prefer the way we weave these ideas into fiction, but there’s something to be said for attempting to stay close to the heart of a real story when so many “based on a true story” films diverge wildly from their source material.

I always love bringing up Fly Away Home as an example. That film was inspired by a book about a man who essentially did what Fly Away Home is about, helping geese migrate by using an ultralight aircraft. The problem is that he wasn’t a father and he didn’t have a daughter, meaning Anna Paquin is playing a character who didn’t exist. The filmmakers decided it would make for a more heartwarming family film if Jeff Daniels’s character had a daughter, and so he suddenly had one. That’s the fictionalization of a true story. We can either completely consider something fiction and acknowledge what inspired it, or start bending reality because we think audiences need something that real life failed to provide. The Witness seems far less interested in doing that. Alex and André Hanscombe were consultants on the series, and I hope Alex, whose memoir Letting Go helped inspire this limited series, feels that the finished product represents his life and story.

The audio description is fairly decent throughout. I think my favorite moment was when the audio description team directly referenced ALF. Since this was 1992, Alex has an ALF toy at one point because the television series wasn’t that far removed from the period. The audio description actually explains ALF by calling him an “alien life form,” which is literally what ALF stands for. It sort of felt like saying CIA and then immediately explaining that it means Central Intelligence Agency. I’m not entirely sure why that choice stuck with me as much as it did, but somehow it became the defining audio description moment of the series for me. Beyond my strange fascination with the ALF explanation, there are plenty of moments where the description does a solid job, and I never felt that the track was inadequate.

To say The Witness isn’t interesting would be a lie. But saying that I’ve found fictional versions of similar ideas more engaging demonstrates the unusual problem this series faces. Could another creative team have taken the same material and made something considerably more suspenseful? Absolutely, but I’m also not sure that was ever the point. The Witness isn’t trying to turn Alex Hanscombe’s trauma into the next great thriller. It’s for true-crime lovers looking for something closer to a just-the-facts-ma’am approach to a murder that really happened and the father and son forced to live with its consequences. Sometimes the truth doesn’t have the dramatic structure we expect from fiction. The Witness respects that, even when that respect occasionally makes it a less compelling television series.

Fresh: 6.8/10