Black Bird Is An Amazing New Prison Series. Can Jimmy Make Friends With A Psychopathic Serial Killer Of Women?

Black Bird is a crime miniseries from the Apple TV+ streaming service. The miniseries captures a story inspired by real events. The main characters are government agents, policemen and criminals. The story mostly takes place in a prison.

Actor Taron Egerton (Kingsman) plays Jimmy Keen, the son of a police officer and a drug dealer, who is caught by the police and sentenced to ten years in prison. But he will get a chance to get his freedom back. The police need a confession and information about serial killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser from I, Tonya).

They think he killed fourteen women, but they only found the body of one of them. Jimmy is first transferred to a maximum security prison, where Larry is also being held. He should gradually get to know him and gain his trust. The problem is that Larry is suspicious and Jimmy is also pressed for time. If Larry is not found guilty soon, he will be free and it is certain, that he will kill again.

Interestingly, Jimmy and Larry don't even meet in the first two episodes. The main part of the series will thus take place in the remaining four episodes. The first part focused on Jimmy, with the creators showing his drug business and trial in very quick succession. They didn't bother at all to portray prison life, which we admire.

Some films and series depict prison life in an unrealistic way, or dramatize it too much. If prisons were as harsh, dangerous and deadly as we see in movies and TV shows, they would slowly have to build their own cemeteries.

Black Bird focuses primarily on the characters and their personalities. In the second part, we follow the accused Larry, who is a mentally ill sociopath and a potential murderer of many young women. It seems to Larry that he is only dreaming, but in reality he kidnaps, rapes and murders women in several states of the USA. When the cops get a confession out of him, Larry and his lawyer try to play it off that the cops forced him to do it and that they have no evidence.

This way, Larry will definitely get freed and it's up to Jimmy to prevent his release. If he befriends Larry and gets information from him about other victims, it will become clear that Jimmy is the killer. If you've watched Mindhunter on Netflix, you might have caught a similar crime atmosphere when the investigators were talking to a mentally disturbed killer.

Behind the great atmosphere lies both the script and the actors led by Paul Walter Hauser, who delivers probably the best performance of his career. The actor Taron Egerton is also excellent in the role of Jimmy. In the end, we were also impressed by the actress Sepideh Moafi as a government agent and the late Ray Liotta, who shot his scenes for the series before his death.