FBI True returns to Paramount+ with ten more episodes featuring real-life agents telling the stories of their biggest cases. It’s the familiar setting, where a retired federal agent leads the discussion over beers or coffees, and investigators, attorneys, and others associated with the profiled cases explain how it all went down. Some of these incidents and cases have been covered by the true crime machine before. Some go inside the Bureau in new ways. But either way, you’re in and out of these episodes in 30 minutes, so FBI True is a really efficient way to get a true crime fix.
FBI TRUE – SEASON 8: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “He’s gone missing.” A text about their kid no parent wants to receive.
The Gist: Not only was Albert Stauch’s 11-year-old son Gannon missing, but Albert himself was hundreds of miles away from his Colorado Springs home while on National Guard duty. His wife Letecia was there with Gannon, and reported the boy missing while sending flurries of texts to her husband, which FBI True displays on screen. And as Albert tells his story in the present, sitting around a table at Jake’s Dilemma in New York City, all of the strain and worry he describes appears in his text responses to Letecia.
This season of FBI True features retired supervisory special agent Kristy Kottis as moderator, and Kottis guides the conversation with Stauch, Denver-based retired special agent Jonny Grusing, who worked Gannon’s case, and Colorado district attorney Michael Allen, the lead prosecutor. They describe how the initial confusion over Gannon’s disappearance ballooned into suspicions of foul play, shaky leads to potential abductors, and a multi-agency search party that spread out through the fields, wintery bluffs, and places familiar to the missing boy. And all the while, Letecia was texting Albert. “They have lied,” she says about the cops on the case. “Treated us like crap.” Albert didn’t know what to think, or who to believe. He tells Kottis he was pulled in two directions, desperately trying to locate his son while starting to seriously suspect his wife.
The “Gannon is Missing” case runs across two episodes of FBI True Season 8, which is typical of this series – it will feature two more two-parters this season, one about the feds’ takedown of “Teflon Don” mobster John Gotti, the other about a terror plot in Austin, TX. No matter the case, with half-hour run times per episode, the focus is always on expediting the facts and presenting a first-person narrative.
And in Colorado Springs, as Gannon was nowhere to be found, the investigation was taking some alarming turns. With missing persons, Grusing says, the FBI always “clears the family first.” With this case, that was becoming more and more difficult.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? FBI True executive producer Craig Turk created the CBS procedural FBI with Dick Wolf, which has since become a franchise. But so has FBI True! Turk has applied its “talkin’ facts” format to PD True and Special Ops True.
Our Take: What could be more true crime than talking with the true feds who fought the true crimes? That’s the MO for FBI True, which presents from agents’ and others’ perspectives the cases, killings, terror plots, and missing persons that these days typically become true crime documentary material. For example, the lead case for Season 8 was a media sensation. Court TV and true crime podcasts were all over it. But FBI True presents the information in a steady stream, with an emphasis on how the case unfolded, day by day, sometimes hour by hour, and leaves out the larger, shoutier context. It’s very much not trying to sensationalize, or do that thing today’s true crime industry often does, where murders and violence are discussed with ironic detachment.
Because it’s formal federal agents doing the discussing, there’s the occasional feel of a professional defense mechanism kicking in with FBI True. Like this series had to be made because all these fictional federal agents are out here stealing the real ones’ valor. Which isn’t really our problem. We’ll let that slide and focus instead on what we like most about True, which is the way this series presents facts, and how it gives space to professional people to speak with their own words.
Performance Worth Watching: We like it whenever law enforcement types manage to transcend dry “cop speak” while explaining their work, and FBI True establishes the right conditions for this with its conversational setting.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: FBI True sets up its next episode, which concludes the “Gannon Is Missing” saga. “Did I kill Gannon? The answer is no! I can’t believe you asked me this!”
Sleeper Star: With a little boy missing for over 24 hours, his stepmother is suddenly saying some very strange things in local news interviews. “When this is over, I really hope I get a sincere apology from everyone.”
Most Pilot-y Line: “In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.” OK, FBI True voiceover guy. “People tell stories about us.” Yes, yes they do. “But they don’t know the half of it.”
Our Call: Stream It. Season 8 of FBI True continues to apply an expedited, fact-heavy approach to its docuseries formula. It’s like true crime, in digest form, from those who were there.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
