Erin Lee Carr

Carr's early work announced a clear thesis: the internet does strange, sometimes catastrophic things to people, and those stories deserve a camera. Her first major HBO documentary, Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop, put that idea on the table directly — a New York City police officer, a dark online fantasy, and the question of where thought ends and crime begins. It didn't answer everything neatly. That was the point. Mommy Dead and Dearest followed, and then came the project that most people associate with her name: I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter (2019), a two-part HBO documentary about the texting suicide case that had already consumed national headlines. The film doesn't let the viewer off easy — sitting with the ambiguity of Carter's culpability across two episodes is genuinely uncomfortable, which is exactly what Carr seems to want. At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal (2019) marked something of a turning point in terms of scale and cultural weight. The documentary examined the Larry Nassar abuse case through the testimony of survivors, and while plenty of outlets covered the story in print, Carr's version gave it a different kind of gravity — one that came from letting the women speak at length, on their own terms. Variety reported that she was among the documentary world's most closely watched directors by the mid-2010s, a reputation the gymnastics film only reinforced. She's since expanded beyond HBO. Netflix's Britney vs. Spears and Hulu's Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara show a filmmaker who can't be pinned to a single platform or a single type of story — though the throughline of power, vulnerability, and digital life stays consistent. Her biggest formal leap came in 2024, when she co-created and executive produced Murdaugh: Death in the Family for Hulu, a scripted limited series starring Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke (Wikipedia). Hard to say if scripted television becomes her primary lane going forward, but the move signals she's not done experimenting.