How Curb Your Enthusiasm Saved a Man From Death Row
True crime and happy endings don’t typically go hand-in-hand. Netflix has been producing a series of acclaimed true crime documentaries, but as titles like Evil Genius and Making a Murderer suggest, they normally plumb the darkest sides of crime and injustice. But Long Shot, a short documentary about how Los Angeles man Juan Catalan avoided death row, is a rare exception. The 40-minute film tells the surprising story of how a baseball game and a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode saved a man’s life.
Long Shot begins like a standard true crime documentary. There’s a murdered woman, a wrongfully accused man, aggressive cops, and lots of talking heads. There’s even a villain: the prosecutor known as “sniper” because she’s so aggressive at “picking off” defendants with the death penalty. In 2003, someone murdered a teenage girl named Martha Puebla, and police decided, with little evidence, that Juan Catalan was the killer. In his interrogation footage, we see a distraught Catalan baffled by the charges. “Please, you guys can’t do this to me, dude,” he tells one cop. Catalan does have an alibi. He was at a Dodgers game with his daughter and friends. But he needs video evidence to prove it. That’s where Long Shot takes a surprising turn, and “mega huge Hollywood star” Larry David comes in.
(And if you want to avoid any more details than that, go watch it before reading the rest of this review.)
Through an extremely rare bit of luck, Catalan’s lawyer learns that Curb Your Enthusiasm had shot footage at the Dodgers game during an episode when Larry David picks up a prostitute so he can use the carpool lane. Long Shot gets a nice shot of energy with the appearance of Larry David as a talking head true crime witness (which sounds like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode plot itself). It’s a—yes—long shot to find Catalan among the 50,000 plus fans in the stadium. But as you can guess, it all works out and Catalan goes free.
If this sounds like an interesting story that doesn’t really have that much meat on its bones, well, you’re not wrong. But Long Shot realizes that and finishes the story in a quick 40 minutes. Long Shot was made over a decade after the crime, giving the documentary a lighter tone. This is a case that has become a cool story that Larry David tells at parties and something the Catalan family seems to have thankfully moved past. Long Shot does leave you with an unsettling feeling of how much our justice system depends on chance. A man’s life was almost taken away. What if his brother hadn’t been a filing clerk for “this kick-ass lawyer”? What if Curb Your Enthusiasm had shot in a different section of seats? Or on a different day? What about all the innocent people in jail right now who didn’t have that one-in-a-million luck?
