The Witness

“The murder of Rachel Nickell in 1992 was one of the most appalling crimes in modern British history. Partly because a 23-year-old woman was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in broad daylight on a pleasant summer’s day on Wimbledon Common, but also because her two-year-old son, Alex, witnessed the whole thing. True-crime drama The Witness (Netflix) could have been lurid, sensationalist and unpleasant (the streaming service has form in this area), but Rob Williams’s miniseries takes a quieter, more powerful path. Its success is in no small part down to a phenomenal, star-making performance from Jordan Bolger.”
Chris Bennion, Telegraph

“If some details are so appalling that they are difficult to believe, it is easier to do so considering how honest The Witness is about how imperfectly André and Alex, who consulted on the script with writer Rob Williams, conducted themselves after their loss. This programme deals in difficult truths; how toxic our media can be is one of them. In the background are the police, and in this truncated telling the lead detective, Keith Pedder (Neil Maskell), is a flawed but essentially sympathetic professional whose use of an undercover female officer to entrap his chief suspect, the innocent Colin Stagg, is a mistake made by a man coming under severe pressure from his superiors and, again, the media. If both that section of the narrative and the one following the later cold-case investigation that caught the real killer feel perfunctory, they give us a strange sort of respite from André and Alex’s ordeal. They had to live it, without help or relief; The Witness is a valuable insight into what that hell was like.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian