TV Review: Tales you can't make up

Krishla Fuataha, Tania Vini and Lucy Akatere were jailed for an attack they did not commit.

Unsolved true-life crime as entertainment is hot stuff. There was Serial, the podcast, which achieved the unlikely feat of making that earnest beast that is American public radio appointment listening.

And then came The Jinx, an HBO documentary which may have proved to be just that - a jinx - for its subject. Robert Durst, an enigmatic character from a wealthy American real estate family who ended up living as a woman in a dump, agreed, for equally enigmatic reasons, to be interviewed about the disappearance of his wife, and about two unsolved murders. He is now facing a murder charge. The lawyers of the subject of Serial, Adnan Syed, are attempting to get him a new trial.

But these shows - and any number of fictional cop procedurals about crime - are based on narratives in which the tension comes from not knowing who did the crime, and so the audience has as much involvement and investment in attempting to solve the crime from the couch.

TV One's excellent I am Innocent (Wednesdays, 8.30pm) has, then and on the face of it, its work cut out for it. We know that those whose stories are told are innocent - the title does that for us, even if we have forgotten the details of those stories. So far the series has told the stories of the three teenage Auckland girls who were sent to prison in 2001 for attacking another young girl.

Only two, Tania Vini and Lucy Akatere, appeared. Tania's mum sent Tania pyjamas in prison. They were Mickey Mouse PJs. After their release, the girl who wore Mickey Mouse PJs in prison took to drinking and playing up. They were good girls, who knew that their families were proud of them; they were expected to do well at school; to have good lives ahead of them. Instead they "lost their innocence ... their reputation, their friends, their schooling".

And, this week, the story of a man, "Michael Smith", which is not his real name, who was jailed for 14-and-a-half months for abusing one of his two young sons. He was innocent, too. He is on good terms with the boy, whose name is also changed, now grown up, whose "evidence" helped convict him.

"Michael Smith" seems a decent man, capable of forgiveness - two of his siblings believed him to be guilty; he has since resumed a relationship with them, too. He received compensation - long gone; he developed a gambling addiction.

The then-teenage girls also got compensation, also long gone. The mother of one of the girls said, sadly, she had no idea what her daughter had done with the money.

"Michael Smith" also received an apology from the police but, as he said, nobody had ever apologised to his son, who was still crippled with guilt about his false accusation.

These are not stories with happy endings.

They are of lives that went off the rails after the wrongly accused were found to be innocent. Prison does bad things to to people; whispers don't stop; entire families - and their finances - are shattered.

"Michael Smith's" story was almost unbearable. His sons were being abused, by their stepfather. He became bitter and angry, said his lawyer, Rob Harrison - who must be a sort of hero - who believed in him and has never judged him, even when he became unpleasant to be around.

"Michael" had planned to use the compensation money to in turn compensate his parents, who spent all of their retirement money and re-mortgaged their house to help get him out of prison.

They died before he got the money. It felt like "blood money", he said, so he got rid of it.

This was a terrific feat of documentary making. Everything had to be reconstructed and so dramatised, which all too often means over-dramatised. I Am Innocent tells its stories calmly and methodically - using the words of those who are the real victims here.

But methodically does not mean ploddingly. These are stories with a compelling narrative drive and they are told with authentic compassion, never overdone.

- Time Out