TikTok Review: Murder Gone Viral – This poor show dramatically trivializes the stories of these victims | TV and radio

IIn July 2023, 17-year-old Charlie Couser attended a party in Warnham, West Sussex. Like many parents of teenagers, Martin and Tara Coser were delighted that their son would be going to a gathering at a private home, rather than a potentially wild night out in Guildford, Surrey, as they had originally planned.

Unfortunately, the Kozer family was wrong. A fight broke out on the dance floor at the party, and Charlie was stabbed three times in the chest by Jorah Faribros, who was 16 at the time. Charlie’s catastrophic injuries included a severed aorta, leading to internal bleeding and cardiac arrest. One of the many harrowing moments recalled here is Charlie’s sister, Eloise – now 18 – listening to her brother’s heartbeat one last time, before his life support was turned off two and a half days after the attack. He was, Martin says, “a lovely son in every way.”

Charlie Couser’s murder is one of three cases featured in the second series of ITV’s TikTok: Murder Gone Viral, a series centered around crimes with clear links (some more obvious than others) to social media, whether in their causes or the publicity generated after the fact. It’s a strange show that veers unevenly from harrowing true crime to wrenching family testimony (Eloise describes family life today as a “lonely bubble”). Even when the film is at least interesting, its overreliance on clips of strangers taken from the titular social media app detracts from the whole thing significantly.

This is even more clearly the case in the second episode, about the death of a 13-year-old girl, Tristin Bailey, in Florida. Here, the TikTok connection is largely limited to the wild speculation that erupted online in the wake of Billy’s death. Heartfelt contributions from her family are interspersed with trivial remarks from people who don’t know her (Annie Elise, a crime vlogger, says she “immediately knew something was wrong” when she heard the teen was missing). One unapproved TikTok clip describes Aiden Fauci — a classmate who was later sentenced to life in prison for Billy’s murder — a “piece of trash.”

Although contempt of court is less important in the US than in the UK, the idea that people were discussing and hypothesizing about the issue openly online is presented as something more worthy than the narrowness it obviously was. Some TikTok clips still have their usernames intact; Although it’s unfair to single out any social media sleuths by name here, a quick Google search shows that some of them are posting short videos with titles like “What Are the Most Brutal True Crime Cases?” and “The Unsolved Mystery of Human Remains in Qafzeh.”

The episode about Koser, at least initially, has a less bad relationship with social media; In fact, it was his father, Martin, who was posting on TikTok about his son’s death, and who continues to raise awareness of the dangers of knife crime online and in the wider world through the Charlie’s Promise charity. However, I can’t help but feel as though the family deserves better than to be lumped into a series that picks and chooses how they feel about the internet from minute to minute. Later, we were told that there was a flood of racist material on the app about Varybrus, claiming that he was a Ukrainian refugee, but we were given no further information. TikTok: Murder Gone Viral favors a more accessible approach, featuring comments like “I’m so sorry. [Varybrus] “He will pay in hell.”

The series finale revisits the very sad and already highly publicized death of Brianna Ghey, adding a little to what the audience already knows. However, given that Guy – a trans teen trying to find her place in the world – had a following on the app, she may have seemed the least affected of the three. Her father Peter says Brianna has “thrived” on TikTok, while we also hear from her friend Viv, another trans girl she met through the app. It’s a shame, then, that the show once again relies on the general nonsense of outsiders to fill in the gaps.

As standalone films, The Killing of Charlie Cosser and The Killing of Brianna Ghey could have worked, but they could also have been much better. Overall, I think they are likely to do more good than harm. But I’m still not entirely sure what they’re trying to say about social media’s role in these devastating deaths.