The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox EPs on Grounding True-Crime Stories

The trial, conviction and subsequent exoneration of Amanda Knox for the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, has received extensive doc coverage, landing in that category of tabloid-preferred scandals that made headlines across the globe. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which launched on Hulu this month, tells the story of Knox’s long journey to clear her name—she serves as an executive producer—but at its core, the eight-part series is an examination of bias, two of its producers tell TV Drama.

Knox worked with Monica Lewinsky to find a writer to tell her story in scripted form, enlisting executive producer K.J. Steinberg and the team at The Littlefield Company, founded by former NBC chief Warren Littlefield. Lisa Harrison and Ann Johnson, executive producers at The Littlefield Company, have been a part of bringing Knox’s twist-filled story to screens for the past three years.

“It’s such a unique way of talking about a true crime,” Johnson tells TV Drama Weekly. “It’s about Amanda’s trials. It’s not salacious, ‘let’s get into the nitty gritty of the horrible thing that happened to Meredith.’ It’s about how Amanda and Raffaele [Sollecito, Knox’s then-boyfriend, also convicted of Kercher’s murder] had to navigate their trial.”

“The North Star that K.J. pitched from the beginning was the anatomy of bias,” Harrison adds. “This was a story that was enough of a car crash that people would look at it, and then once they were looking at it, you could use it to examine all the ways that the different players and institutions bring their biases to bear, whether they’re economic, religious or cultural. If we could maintain exploring that bias in some way, [we could] transcend the tragedy of what happened to Meredith, and everyone else.”

Knox was “generous with her history,” says Johnson, but there were no directives on how she needed to be portrayed by Grace Van Patten in the series. “She trusted K.J. and Monica. She was open to how K.J. wanted to tell the story. She wanted it to be told truthfully.”

“We learned a new word working on this project,” Harrison notes. “We did not want it to be a hagiography. Everyone involved has too much credibility on the line not to tell a story that has integrity. We were cross-checking with ourselves and everybody participating who had different points of view to make sure that it had as much integrity as it could.”

Using a range of sources, including court transcripts and Sollecito’s book, the key was to be “evenhanded,” Johnson and Harrison explain. “We didn’t have a desire to paint anyone as the villain in this, except for Rudy [Guede, who was eventually convicted of Kercher’s murder]—and we did not even paint him as the villain,” Johnson says.

“It has to be about something more universal than what happened in this story,” Johnson adds. “We’re doing another true-crime-based project. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about themes and what the story is beneath the story. It’s so important to do honor to Meredith, to the story itself and that moment in time. I’m a true-crime junkie. I’ll dip into something and move away from it if it’s just, Let me tell you about this horrible thing that happened. There’s the psychology of what goes on in these stories for the survivors, the victims and the perpetrator that is interesting.”

Harrison notes, “I’m not a true-crime person. I would not have been able to work on this for so long and with such intensity without having that as a larger theme.”