#Dark woods podcast series#
#Dark woods podcast tv#

In the summer of 1989, Barbara Neder disappeared from her home never to be seen again.

#Dark woods podcast series#

Written by International Emmy Award winner Stefan Kolditz and starring actors Matthias Brandt and Karoline Schuch this Topic original series tells the story of the disappearance of Barbara Neder in the late 1980s.

#Dark woods podcast tv#

And in this review we’re looking at one of these true-crime TV shows, a German mini-series called Dark Woods. Whatever it is, true crime has found a huge audience for itself and is here to stay.

Or maybe it’s because we get to piece together the mysteries just as the people on screen or the voices on the podcast do. Maybe it’s the fact that the titles that are part of it are inspired by events that actually happened. And no wonder, there’s just something about the true crime genre that draws people in. “I’ve been since the early ’90s, and it’s been a struggle the whole way through,” says Zahn McClarnon, a Lakota actor best known for his supporting roles on shows like Fargo and Westworld, who plays Detective Joe Leaphorn in Dark Winds.In the last few years true crime podcasts, movies, and shows have become extremely popular. “I’m really glad that I’ve stuck out this business and that I’m finally seeing this stuff come to fruition with having Native writers, Native crew, Native talent and Native directors and producers.

We’re in a unique time.”ĭark Winds, which premieres June 12 on AMC and AMC+, is executive produced by Robert Redford, who acquired the rights to Hillerman’s books in 1986, and George R.R. Martin, who was the mystery writer’s friend from 1980 until Hillerman’s death in 2008. The $5 million-an-episode show is filmed in three different sovereign nations, written by a writers room of five Indigenous writers, primarily directed by filmmaker Chris Eyre - of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, he is best known for his 1998 film Smoke Signals - produced by Graham Roland (Chickasaw), shot by a crew that is 85 percent Native American and starring actors McClarnon, Kiowa Gordon (Hualapai) as Detective Jim Chee and Jessica Matten (Red River Metis-Cree) as Sergeant Bernadette Manuelito, a character the Dark Winds writers expanded from the books.ĭark Winds arrives in a moment when Native content on TV is enjoying a three-show boomlet, with season two of Reservation Dogs, the Indigenous teen comedy Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi created for FX on Hulu (in which McClarnon also stars), premiering Aug. 3, and season two of the Peacock sitcom Rutherford Falls, co-created by Navajo showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas with Ed Helms and Mike Schur, due June 16. This year’s Sundance Film Festival programmed 15 projects by Indigenous artists. McClarnon grew up around Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, the son of a Hunkpapa-Lakota mother and an Irish American father. The show began over what Eyre calls a “casually intentional” lunch in 2016 at the Four Seasons Rancho Encantado in Santa Fe, attended by Redford, Martin, Eyre and Kathleen Broyles of the Sundance Institute, who all have homes in the area. Martin and Redford had never met, but, “You don’t say no when the Sundance Kid invites you to lunch,” says Martin. Will you come aboard, help us develop it and get this placed?’ “ “So I went, and they said, ‘Look, you know Tony’s books? We’re trying to get them going. In the ’80s, Martin had tagged along with his mentor, science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, to a monthly luncheon Hillerman threw for local writers at the Albuquerque Press Club, and Martin soon became a lunch regular and an admirer of Hillerman’s. “If I could help get them on the screen, introduce a whole new generation of people to the work of Tony Hillerman and to this world … Yeah.

I was glad to sign on.”Īs advocates go, a project could hardly do better than to have Redford, statesman of cinema and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, and Martin, TV’s genre king, at that point midway through the HBO adaptation of his best-selling Game of Thrones novels. But Dark Winds would need all of the Hollywood firepower it could get. Starting when Hillerman published his first book in the series in 1970, business-minded collaborators have been trying to minimize the Navajo parts of the narrative in what they considered otherwise highly bankable page-turners. As the author told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, when he pitched his first Joe Leaphorn book to an agent, “She told me the only chance of selling it was to get rid of all the Indian stuff - it slowed down the book.