What’s fact and what’s fiction in Netflix’s tale of serial killer Charles Cullen?
This is the first season of Charles Cullen, the first season of a new thriller series from Netflix that comes at us with a series of questions and asks us to make up our minds. In the premiere episode, two people die on an island, and we learn that neither of them was the one who killed them, but their death is connected to the lives of the couple that came to the island in the first place. Does that mean that the dead couple are also connected to the murders? Is this the death-by-divide, death-by-coma variety?
In a way, the premiere of a new series and the first episode of a show is the same thing. They give you so many new questions and they’re asking you to make up your mind about things you haven’t gotten to yet. And that’s actually how we ended up settling on a name for the show. The initial thought was “What do you call a new series starring a serial killer?” And then we thought we should be doing it with Netflix, and then we thought that maybe it could be a psychological thriller, and that it could be about families or couples, or the effects of a trauma on the mind. So we thought there was a lot of potential there, and then we figured out that we wanted more of a psychological thriller, and that we could just call it a new series about a serial killer, and that would be a lot better than “Serial Killer’s Bride,” which is what we already had. Then we thought we could do like a thriller or a psychological thriller that’s really fun and really emotional without necessarily having to do much with serial killers. And then we could just call it “Death by Divide.” And then Netflix said, “OK, well, why not do this? This is Netflix.” And so we’re just trying to get as much out of it as we can. So when you watch the premiere, and you wonder if you’re watching the first episode of a new series, you can just look at the episode titles and know what we’re going to be able to do over the next couple
