Summary
Maternal Instinct is a disappointing, sensationalist flop that gives a brutal killer the exact spotlight she craved. By focusing almost entirely on the perpetrator, Netflix delivers a disrespectful disservice to the Hancock family and the victims who lost their lives.
Maternal Instinct left me feeling sick and confused. I wouldn’t recommend watching it, purely because of the level of disrespect shown to the Hancock family. To hold an audience’s attention, you must have the skill to tell a story. Unfortunately, Netflix true crime documentary Maternal Instinct has undoubtedly flopped. The story of Taylor Parker is completely engulfed in evil and mental illness; therefore, you would expect a documentary portraying the events to be sickening, uncomfortable, and disturbing.
The production of this documentary doesn’t portray the kind of evil that is encompassed in this crime. There’s a disconnection; it is baffling that it took 60+ minutes to create any uncomfortable sensitivity.
The disturbance is there, but the documentary focuses too much time on telling the backstory of Taylor and who she is. It is important to understand Taylor, but like so many other true crime documentaries, all of the focus is on the perpetrator and not the innocent victims. Consider the irony….
Maternal Instinct barely scratches the surface of the tragic lives that were lost. Reagan Simmons-Hancock was brutally killed, mutilated, and had her baby stolen from her womb by Taylor Parker. Yet, it takes 78 minutes of a 96-minute documentary to show footage saying, “Taylor’s in jail. Best we can tell, looks like she killed a woman and cut her baby out of her and passed it off as being hers.”
My jaw dropped. The documentary had not made it clear until this moment the severity of the crime – If you ask me, that’s peculiar.
Let’s put this into perspective: for the majority of the documentary, we have old friends of Taylor’s commenting via interviews that all she craved was attention. Attention from everyone around her. So what does this documentary do? It gives it all to her – and insufficient focus on the woman who lost her life, the baby who died, and Homer, the husband and father.
Both Wade and Homer deserve to have an equal amount of their story told. The fact that this documentary doesn’t provide that is disgraceful and disrespectful to the Hancock family.
From a technical standpoint, my proposal of the layout would be a 3-part series; a chapter dedicated to Taylor, Wade Griffin, and Homer Hancock. The director did not need to spend the majority of the production time focusing on every minuscule behaviour and communication of Taylor.
Again, what we see here is a tragedy being exploited for sensationalism.
I guess the bottom line of this story is that Taylor Parker is still getting what she wants most, and that is to have everything be about her and nobody else (minus the impending death row sentence, you could argue).
