TV Review: “Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese” Is True Crime With a Teenage Soul
The murder of Skylar Neese is a case that, on the surface, sounds like countless others in the true crime canon: a teenager disappears, investigators circle her closest friends, and the truth that eventually surfaces is more devastating than anyone wanted to believe. What makes Hulu's new three-part docuseries Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese worth your time is both the story itself and the way director Clair Titley (The Contestant) has chosen to tell it.
From its opening moments, Friends Like These announces itself as something distinct from the genre's conventions. Rather than the stark lower-thirds and clinical talking-head setups familiar to true crime viewers, Titley builds a visual world that feels borrowed from the teenage experience itself. Social media posts from 2012 are rendered as chalk scratched into locker walls. Interviewee names appear in marker-scrawled handwriting over photographs, as though written by a classmate. Tweets materialize on football fields. The color palette is warm and saturated, closer to a teen movie than a crime documentary.
The effect is purposeful and largely successful. It places viewers inside the world that 16-year-old Skylar Neese and her friends inhabited in Morgantown, West Virginia — a world where social media wasn't a separate thing from real life but an extension of it, where feelings were broadcast publicly and only the adults weren't paying attention. The series makes a quiet but pointed argument: the evidence of what was happening between these girls was visible all along.
On the procedural side, the series does solid work reconstructing how investigators pieced the case together. When Skylar's father, Dave, discovers her bed unslept in and her window open in July 2012, the subsequent investigation moves through familiar beats — canvassing the neighborhood, pulling security footage, chasing tips — but the details remain absorbing. Grainy black-and-white footage of Skylar climbing into a sedan in the middle of the night, taken from an apartment building camera an hour after her two best friends claimed to have dropped her off at home, is the kind of detail that stops you cold.
Former FBI supervisory special agent Dr. Rob Ambrosini, who served as a polygraph expert on the case, is one of the series' more compelling interview subjects — precise and measured in the way of someone who has spent decades navigating the gap between what people say and what they mean. His account of bringing Skylar's two best friends, Shelia and Rachel, in for questioning adds texture to what might otherwise feel like a procedural checklist.
Where the series earns its keep most fully is in its portrait of Skylar as a person. Through her diaries, her social media posts, and the recollections of classmates, a picture emerges of a girl who was funny and grounded and quietly struggling — someone who felt left behind as her two closest friends grew closer to each other and more distant from her. The jealousy in her diary entries, the loneliness in her tweets, the sense of being slowly edged out of the group she thought was hers: these details accumulate into something that feels genuinely mournful rather than exploitative. The classmate interviews are handled with similar care. These are people returning not only to a tragedy but to one of the most vulnerable periods of their own lives — and that weight is palpable on screen.
At three hours, Friends Like These occasionally feels stretched thin. The series has a tendency to linger on the unfolding of the investigation in a way that prioritizes dramatic pacing over a more direct account of events — and viewers who already know the broad outlines of the case may find some of that runway frustrating. The third episode in particular spends considerable time on the trial and its aftermath, ground that feels somewhat obligatory after the more intimate emotional work of the first two episodes. The story's power lies in what happened to Skylar and why; the legal machinery that followed is, by comparison, less compelling territory.
Those reservations aside, Friends Like These is a genuinely distinctive entry in a crowded genre. Titley's commitment to centering Skylar — not just as a victim but as a person with an interior life, a sense of humor, and a story that deserved to be told on her own terms — gives the series a humanity that most true crime doesn't attempt. For fans of the genre looking for something that takes its craft seriously, it's well worth three hours of your time.
Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese premieres Friday, March 6th, on Hulu.