When They See Us is, in many ways, brutal viewing. Writer-director Ava DuVernay’s sweeping, four-episode depiction of what led to the wrongful 1990 conviction (and eventual exoneration in 2002) of a handful of teenage boys from Harlem…
The men, whose story will be brought to life in Netflix’s “When They See Us,” discuss the mini-series with their onscreen counterparts.
Ava DuVernay’s mini-series depicts the excruciating toll that persecution and incarceration had on the teenage boys known as the Central Park Five.
Folk tales have always existed to give shape and meaning to the formless randomness of ordinary life, and to account for why certain occurrences — the death of a parent, the rejection of a lover, the rivalry between brothers — can have an impact on our psyches disproportionate to their un-mythic scale.
Watch the Ava DuVernay-directed story on Netflix and learn more about how the legal system and media robbed five innocent teens of their presumption of innocence and so much more.