TV Review: Experience a Real-Life Jailbreak In the New Hulu True Crime Docuseries "Girl On the Run"

Today saw the debut of the new ABC News Studios docuseries Girl On the Run: America's Most Wanted Woman on the Disney-owned Hulu streaming service. Laughing Place was provided with an early screener of this three-episode true crime miniseries, and below are my thoughts.

There's no shortage of true crime documentaries on Hulu or elsewhere, so in order to grab viewers' attentions, a new release must really stand out. Girl On the Run from ABC News Studios does so by chronicling an interesting case in which a woman is arrested for murder alongside her boyfriend, both of them claim innocence for different reasons (but are each convicted and sentenced), and then the woman escapes from her incarceration. Specifically, the woman in question in this case is Sarah Jo Pender, who was only 21 at the time when she and her then-boyfriend Richard Hull were arrested on charges of the double murder of their fugitive roommates.

Told from the current perspective of 25 years later, Girl On the Run goes through most of the details from the case but arranges them in a suspenseful order so as to keep the viewer guessing as to where the twists and turns might be headed. It kicks off with Pender's escape from Indiana's Rockville Correctional Facility itself, which is admittedly the most interesting aspect of the story. From there it goes back to Pender's once-promising youth, her relationships with her parents, and how she became involved with Hull-- a known drug dealer-- in the first place. The documentary shifts forward and backward in time to flesh out the rest of the story: the circumstances surrounding the murders, how Pender sustained her months-long flight from law enforcement, and even some surprising revelations that come late in the game during the third and final episode.

Along for the ride is a United States Marshal who becomes so engrossed in his quest to track down Pender that it begins to affect his personal life. With the escaped convict appearing on-camera (as, thankfully, do most of the players in this saga) to assert her own innocence throughout the runtime of the documentary, on its surface the narrative plays a lot like the 1993 Harrison Ford movie The Fugitive and the 1960s television series that inspired it. But ultimately this tale goes in a very different direction that that of Richard Kimble and the One-Armed Man, and I was appreciative that it kept me on my toes in that regard, unfolding in a way that I might not have guessed from the first chapter.

There are times when Girl On the Run comes across as a little sensational and the ins and outs of its true story are overly dramatized to the point where some of it began to feel inauthentic to me. But the Sarah Pender case remains sufficiently engaging on its own for the docuseries to overcome its own unnecessary flourishes and deliver an intriguing portrait of a woman who was either wrongly imprisoned after falling in with the wrong people, or-- like some of the more lurid tabloid headlines, news broadcasts, and even a later-regretful prosecutor branded her-- a Charles Manson-like psychopath capable of manipulating everyone around her. The question of that dichotomy lies at the heart of this miniseries, which I would say is entertaining and informative enough to satisfy even the most seasoned true crime fans.

Girl On the Run: The Hunt for America's Most Wanted Woman is now available to stream, exclusively via Hulu and Hulu On Disney+.