FBI True Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
“In the FBI,” a narrator says, “we make a lot of headlines,” and footage of federal tactical teams stopping cars and busting through doors mixes with clips from TV and movies, everybody from Special Agent Fox Mulder to Tom Hanks in Catch Me if You Can and a chase scene from a network procedural. “We understand why people want to tell stories about us. But they don’t know the half of it.”
Enter the Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor, a bar nearby the FBI’s New York City HQ, where retired Supervisory Special Agent Cindy Coppola sits down with John Miller, former director of FBI public affairs in New York, and Chuck Berger, a retired member of the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. In 2016, Miller and Berger were instrumental in the inter-agency effort to locate the perpetrator of a series of bombing attacks across New York and New Jersey, and together they recount for Coppola the tense atmosphere surrounding the investigation.
As world leaders gathered at the UN downtown, an improvised explosive device detonated in Seaside Heights, near Newark, followed by the discovery of another IED on a Manhattan street. It was a pressure cooker, cemented shut, with a cell phone taped on top and red wires all over. In other words, trouble in motion for the FBI. Who put them there? Why? And where would they strike next?
Miller and Berger describe how cell phone data connected a suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, who they now needed to locate. “There’s no part of the intelligence community that isn’t pulling threads on, where did this guy travel? Who does he know? Who does he call?” And with the discovery of another bomb, their dragnet closes around the man, who engages law enforcement in a desperate bid to escape.
The half-hour installments of FBI True don’t allow for a full reckoning with a case, from reports of an incident to authorities’ initial response, their investigation, and all of the eventual outcomes. (This is made clear by the Waco siege and the Alabama bunker hostage crisis, which encompass two episodes each.) But in lieu of revealing every gritty detail in these cases, FBI True highlights personal insights from the agents interviewed. And together with the whole thing being shot in a New York City bar, complete with pints of beer being quaffed, there’s a bit more individuality on display here than what the same federal agents might offer if they were interviewed in their professional capacity for any of the true crime documentaries that proliferate streaming services.
It’s also smart to have an experienced FBI agent conducting the on-camera portion of the interviews. There are very few leading questions. Instead, the sense in FBI True is of professionals interacting as equals, sharing stories. One of the highlights of “The Manhattan Bomber” is when John Miller describes the tenor of the joint operations center, as representatives from the FBI and multiple agencies formulated a plan to nab their suspect. While we’ve watched a similar sequence hundreds and hundreds of times in television procedurals, the one described here was entirely real.
