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Season 1 – Captive Audience

Play trailer 2:26 Poster for Season 1 – Captive Audience Apr 2022 Documentary Crime Play Trailer Watchlist
Watchlist Tomatometer Popcornmeter
92% Tomatometer 13 Reviews 61% Popcornmeter Fewer than 50 Ratings
The evolution of true-crime storytelling is told through lens of the 1972 kidnapping of Steven Stayner, 7, which sparked "stranger danger" warnings, legal reforms and the making of an iconic miniseries titled "I Know My First Name Is Steven."
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Captive Audience — Season 1

Critics Reviews

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Nick Schager The Daily Beast 04/22/2022
Easy answers aren’t Captive Audience’s main concern, though; instead, director Dimmock introduces a host of thorny ideas without attempting to devise a pat conclusion that will neatly tie everything together. Go to Full Review
Richard Roeper Chicago Sun-Times 04/22/2022
3/4
As for Kay Stayner—it’s a wonder she has the strength to even face the cameras and talk about it. Go to Full Review
Alessa Dominguez BuzzFeed News 04/22/2022
Rather than refictionalizing the Stayner family story as if it hadn’t already gotten major media coverage, grappling with their story as a media event makes for a less clichéd, more probing docuseries. Go to Full Review
David Skipwith The Post NZ 07/18/2022
This dark and heartbreaking series is told through interviews with Stayner’s family, friends and school teachers... Go to Full Review
Brooke Daugherty Pop Culture Leftovers 06/13/2022
If you like true crime and have a few hours to kill (pun intended), check out this series. Go to Full Review
Steve Murray ArtsATL 05/31/2022
Weirder still is the Stayner family’s repeated complaint that their side of the story was never shown, that all they ever wanted was to be left alone by the media. So please explain to me how this resulted in a three-part doc very much focused on them? Go to Full Review
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Audience Reviews

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Muirmaiden May 6 This docuseries does not set the record straight or shed new light on the subject. The Stayners are a family of secrets and this is evidenced by the mother's denial about the environment that she and her late husband created for their children. So much information is left out and myths are perpetuated. The director chose not to expand on the mitigation expert's findings in the third episode, which leaves unanswered questions. I wouldn't recommend this if you are looking for a truthful account of events. See more Travis F 06/28/2024 The story itself is interesting albeit heartbreaking. The issue I have with this show is the direction the production goes. It showed too many clips of that badly produced movie from the 80's and even worse, having actors read for lines pretending they were the characters involved. In addition to showing clips of the 80's movie, they showed behind the scenes of how the 80's movie director wanted to tell the story, which was all fiction... why do we need to watch that?! This show should have stuck to just the actual news clips and new interviews... it would have been a lot shorter but substantially better to watch. See more Brian S 09/01/2023 The first two episodes are a bit slow and not that interesting. The creators should've condensed the first two episodes into one episode and stretched the third episode into two. See more 07/25/2022 It dragged out certain elements for far too long, and for some reason included viewpoints from really irrelevant people, e.g. asking the original actors to re-enact interviews seemed odd, particularly when they also had the original recorded interviews. See more 06/13/2022 Extremely poor documentary filmmaking. Could have condensed that story into 30 minutes and cut out the weird choice of having made for tv movie actors read transcripts instead of playing the actual audio. Bizarre and bad choices by filmmakers. Not sure if they could have stretched a story more thin. See more Read all reviews
Captive Audience — Season 1

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Episodes

Episode 1 Aired Apr 21, 2022 Chapter 1: Steven's Story 1972: 7-year-old Steven Stayner vanishes from Merced, California. For years, his family searches for him, only to find they’ve been looking for the wrong boy. 50 years on, Steven’s children unearth clues to their father’s mysterious past. Details Episode 2 Aired Apr 21, 2022 Chapter 2: Steven's Story A heroic rescue. A dramatic family reunion. But the Stayner ordeal is far from over as painful secrets surface and family rifts form. When a hit TV movie rewrites the Stayner story, reality gets stranger than fiction. Details Episode 3 Aired Apr 21, 2022 Chapter 3: Cary's Story Two decades after Steven went missing near Yosemite, three tourists vanish from the same area. As the FBI investigates, shocking ties to the Stayners emerge. The family is back in headlines - linked to new, horrifying crimes. Details
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Season Info

Director
Jessica Dimmock
Executive Producer
Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, Todd Makurath, Mike Larocca, Andrew Jacobs, Nick Gilhool, Peter Rieveschl, Jennifer Casey, Alexandra Meistrell
Network
Hulu
Rating
TV-MA
Genre
Documentary, Crime
Original Language
English
Release Date
Apr 21, 2022