Critic Reviews

The Keepers is addictive serial made for the post-Serial market. ... White’s narrative is a nesting doll of colorful characters giving way to more colorful characters--stories inside stories, mysteries within mysteries.

The Keepers is much more sophisticated and well-researched [than “Making a Murderer”], offering several different probabilities throughout its seven episodes as to what happened to Sister Cathy. It also aims to solve a murder rather than set a convicted murderer free. It’s executed with empathy, but not to the point where The Keepers lets a foregone conclusion drive the narrative.

The heartbreaking The Keepers [is] a fascinating (but overlong) piece about the murder of a Baltimore nun in 1969 and the revelations that would emerge over the next five decades.

An often fascinating and devastating experience. If it’s not quite as addictive, across seven hours, as the best of its competition, it’s not for lack of effort or craft.

If the series is maybe less viscerally satisfying, it's probably more spiritual rich.

Absorbing and emotionally gripping.

What makes that bigger picture so maddeningly compelling is the way The Keepers explores a pathology of abuse and its effect on victims, chronicles the strange inescapability of trauma, reflects on how society treats the word of women, and reveals the shattering reality that justice can feel so empty.

Its blend of color-tinted recreations, on-camera interviews, and archival photographs may not reinvent the format, but The Keepers understands that one crime does not exist in a vacuum. By acknowledging and documenting the environment that could lead to a brutal murder, the seven-part series says more about the power in being able to tell your own story.

Mostly these are jaw-dropping tales about horrific things that happened a long time ago, limiting the urgency of the narrative. ... In that way, The Keepers is more of a meditation on memory and truth than a murder mystery, and the telling of the tale is a resolution in itself.

White's devotion to the case is apparent, but The Keepers seems like an instance where a less-expansive canvas -- and the concentrated approach that would have required -- would have been more beneficial than the latitude to venture down every corridor, even when they might lead to a dead end.