‘American Nightmare’ finds a ‘Gone Girl’ spin on the docuseries formula of life imitating art

One of the popular tricks of modern docuseries and reality shows is blurring the lines between fact and fiction, presenting stories that play off the audience’s familiarity with Lifetime movies and other forms of drama. What distinguishes “American Nightmare,” Netflix’s latest wrinkle on that formula, is watching the police fall prey to the same mentality, believing that life consciously imitated art.

The short version of what happened in 2015 does sound almost too bizarre to be believed: A young couple, Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins, had someone break into their home, drugging and binding him and kidnapping her. After a search for Huskins, she later turned up hundreds of miles away, saying she had been raped by her unseen abductor before he let her go.

Like many productions in this genre, “American Nightmare” capitalizes upon video of interviews recorded within the police station, TV news accounts and current interviews with those involved, as well as the growing skepticism of authorities regarding Quinn’s story. Even the endings to the episodes have a cliffhanger-style feel.

What really made the case resonate with the media, though, was the theory that Huskins had perpetrated a hoax seemingly modeled after the movie “Gone Girl,” in which a woman fakes her own disappearance. The film, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, had been released the year before and was based on a popular book.

The overt connection to “Gone Girl” makes “American Nightmare” more distinctive, but stylistically it’s far from unique. Indeed, there has been a strong temptation to both develop reality shows based on movie concepts – see Netflix’s “Squid Game: The Challenge” as a recent example – and churn out docuseries that unfold like the kind of murder mysteries one might find on NBC’s “Dateline,” Oxygen or Investigation Discovery.

In the modern era of reality TV, the strategy has produced some memorable excesses. In 2007, for example, CBS aired “Kid Nation,” a series modeled after the book-turned-movie “The Lord of the Flies,” situating kids in a remote New Mexico location and seeing if they could build a society. The controversial program was canceled after one season.

“American Nightmare” notably, comes from the producers of “The Tinder Swindler,” which focused on a man who seduced women and then fleeced them out of their money, a plot featured on another docuseries, “Love Fraud.” Further blurring the lines, both employed dramatic reenactments to flesh out the interviews, with one of the former’s victims, Cecilie Fjellhøy, at one point making the connection overt, saying, “What happened to me felt like a movie.”

Movies and TV do, indeed, provide a helpful kind of shorthand for processing unusual events, which in days of old would occasionally prompt people to ask (or at least wonder) if they were on “Candid Camera,” a show that staged elaborate pranks, when something odd was happening to them.

Today, the cameras are everywhere – including the palms of our hands – but the way we process things through dramatic storytelling remains mostly the same. What makes “American Nightmare” so unsettling is that in this case, as opposed to believing a woman who said she’d been assaulted, the police appeared to quickly pivot to that approach too.

“American Nightmare” is playing on Netflix.

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