Above screenshot from Netflix’s Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. Don’t watch it! It’s bad! What follows is a brief but spoiler-laden review—so don’t read this if you plan on trying to enjoy this show, despite my explicit insistence that you should not do that, and the implicit suggestion that if you already have enjoyed the show that you should feel bad about having done so. Such a welcoming place, this blog.

The Cecil Hotel is a nearly century-old hotel in the skid row area of downtown Los Angeles. As one might imagine, the Cecil has a reputation (and documented history) of violence splattered about and around its fifteen floors. It is a great big building with a grand old lobby and 700 cramped, lipstick’d-pig guest rooms—each, no doubt, with its own potentially grisly story to tell. The building practically begs for the modern documentary treatment, its façade and setting justifying the now-ubiquitous drone camera flyovers that make up approximately forty percent of the footage of all reality-adjacent programming made since 2017.

There are all sorts of alternate versions of this documentary that might have been great—and you can almost see the bones of good television holding up the bloated corpse that they ended up presenting. The one main story they’re telling, about Elisa Lam, is actually quite interesting, and they hint at another half-dozen equally bloody and dreadful stories that they could have told about this hotel. And that’s to say nothing of the untapped well of endless material waiting to spring from the surrounding neighborhood, and the awful policies and politics and policing that turned a part of America’s second largest city into a hellish no-go zone across multiple decades.

The disappearance of Elisa Lam, coupled with a decidedly strange bit of elevator security cam footage, is a good hook, and her eventual discovery—floating dead for weeks in a water tank on the Cecil’s rooftop that supplied, uhh, less than potable water to the guests below—is as ghastly and disquieting and viscerally disgusting a denouement as can be imagined. Just tell that story! You can do it in less than two hours, even! There’s a sad, empathetic story to be told about an introverted Tumblr-blogging college student on her own in a strange city, off her bi-polar meds, having some sort of tragic psychological episode that ends with her inexplicably jumping into a rooftop water tank and drowning.

But they didn’t do anything like that. Instead, they made an unnecessarily long, repetitive, and distracted mess more concerned with securing a few days of social media buzz than serving the story, the victim, or—and most importantly, of course!—the viewer. The show indulges all the worst instincts and conspiracy mongering of the dumbest YouTube’ing “internet sleuths,” just giving free reign to a bunch of weirdo views-chasing ghouls who film themselves traipsing around the Cecil to “get a feel” for the place, and visiting Lam’s gravesite, and rubbing her tombstone. It’s like the producers demanded the amateur vlogger-detective narrative get shoehorned in because of 2019’s far superior Don’t Fuck With Cats, nevermind the fact that those people helped solve a crime using evidence, while these morons only succeeded in self-promotion, racking up views with baseless speculation about vast conspiracies and irresponsibly hurling wrongful murder accusations at innocent people.

But it’s not fair to (only) blame the YouTubers—this slick show, with its good production values and, crucially, with full knowledge of how the story ends, has none of the excuses of ignorance that might forgive those thirsty dorks. So when the show hints that a death metal musician who calls himself Morbid might be involved somehow, it’s not just following a lead, it’s needlessly making an innocent guy’s life worse, compounding the sin of the “internet sleuths.” The show knows that he was at the hotel a full calendar year before Elisa Lam was, but it doesn’t care, because it makes a neat cliffhanger to get the viewer to sit through another episode break.

The heartless amplification of the false accusation might be the worst of it, from a purely human perspective. But from a production standpoint, the show’s withholding of the fact that the water tank was discovered with its lid still off—suggesting that Elisa almost certainly put herself in there—is far worse. Combined with the fact that they obscure her mental illness until the end, it’s clear the show is happy to exploit Lam’s unfortunate demise for little more than an extended runtime.

There is a compelling human story to be told here—about Elisa Lam’s death, about weird and often bad internet-sleuthing culture, about this hotel—but that’s not the story Netflix wanted to tell. Netflix wanted to tell an algorithmic story, a story of steroidal virality and the hopes of a trending hashtag or two, a story that saw tragic human lives as eminently re-victimizable grist for the insatiable Content Maw.

Don’t watch it! It sucks!