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A scene from Discovery Channel's new true-crime series
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Discovery program follows real detective

DISCOVERY

Discovery program follows real detective

Set among the Louisiana swamps where nature makes short work of a dead body, Killing Fields, a new series on Discovery Channel, follows Iberville Parish police Detective Rodie Sanchez as he comes out of retirement to try to close the case — the killing of a young woman, Eugenie Boisfontaine — that’s haunted him for nearly two decades. A local serial killer was thought to be the likely culprit, but the policeman has his doubts.

“My health is deteriorating,” says Sanchez, something of a rough old dog. “I’m getting up in age now. I want to solve this.” He hopes that two decades of forensic breakthroughs and improvements may yield new clues.

“True crime” has been popular for ages; what’s new is the prestige attached to the form. (And there is nothing as prestigious in contemporary television as … prestige.) NPR’s Serial, HBO’s The Jinx, and Netflix’s Making a Murderer were national media events, much obsessed over, and argued about as they were shown. Killing Fields seems to want to join this company rather than that of, say, Do Not Disturb: Hotel Horrors or even CBS’ 48 Hours and adds the fillip of being a “real time” ongoing investigation — “recent time” is more accurate — that will go on until Sanchez gets his killer, he gives up or Discovery pulls the plug.

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Its sister channel Investigation Discovery is true crime all the time, but this is a first for Discovery Channel, more typically busy with such alternative lifestyle and folks-against-nature series as Moonshiners, Naked and Afraid, Yukon Men, and Deadliest Catch. It’s new territory too for big-name producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, whose own pioneering contributions to prestige crime TV have included NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street and HBO’s Oz. (Levinson also directed Diner, Wag the Dog, and others.)

Unlike The Jinx or Serial, the reporters are not part of the story. And rather than focusing on a suspect, perhaps wrongly convicted or acquitted, Killing Fields throws its lot in with the cops, riding by their side as they go, knocking on doors, knocking around the bayous, bantering in ways familiar from fictional representations of police work.

The setting is exotic, and the characters are colorful in ordinary, workaday ways. The series’ one failing is that it doesn’t completely trust them to carry the drama, laying on the high-volume audiovisual tics and tricks of reality television to remind us to be interested and excited.

And yet it’s the smaller, unvarnished, passing moments that sell the show — where its particular poetry, and even its comedy, can be found.

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You hear it in the speech of the woman who discovered the body as she recalls to the detectives, “I was leaving my now-husband’s house early in the morning — you know what I mean,” she says, serving up a back story in a sentence. “I smelled her, and she smelled really sweet; animals are earthier.” And in the precise way in which the nervous owner of the Alligator Bayou Bar, a tumbledown roadhouse on the edge of things, where the victim had been seen, talks too much: “Thank God for you and you and all the deputies, all the law enforcement that stand between evil and us.”

And in Sanchez’s own estimation of how police work has changed: “These young guys I’m working with now, they good, but they sittin’ in they office on they computers Googlin’ up information. I just ain’t got time for that.”

First Published January 8, 2016, 5:00 a.m.

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A scene from Discovery Channel's new true-crime series "Killing Fields."  (DISCOVERY)
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