Wicked Game: Devil In The Desert is a three-part docuseries now streaming on Hulu that revolves around how Newport Beach Sr. Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy, as well as Ryan Peters, the lead detective, pursued Hossein Nayeri, the mastermind of a 2012 kidnapping that left a man named Michael S. (identity protected by the producers) brutally injured and left for dead in the Mojave Desert.
Opening Shot: Scenes from the beach in Newport Beach, CA. A middle-aged man goes out surfing. Matt Murphy, the former Sr. Deputy District Attorney of Newport Beach, is the surfer, and he describes the dynamics of the town.
The Gist: Wicked Game: Devil In The Desert starts with a 2019 20/20 interview with Mary Barnes, who moved into a house in Newport Beach where her boyfriend was roommates with Michael S., who, in 2012, was into the medical marijuana trade. She describes how, with her boyfriend out of town, she and Michael S. were kidnapped at gunpoint and left for dead in the desert. A chance encounter that a traumatized but mostly unharmed Barnes had with a sheriff’s department vehicle in the desert led to the discovery of Michael S. He was alive but suffered some extremely brutal injuries, including genital mutilation.
Interviews with Michael S. as he recovered, plus information garnered from a neighbor they dubbed “Alice Kravitz” after the nosy neighbor character from Bewitched, got them the name Kyle Hanley. They found blood evidence at a house he used as a grow house, but none of it matched him, Michael or Barnes. But the inside of a latex glove gave them a hit: Hossein Nayeri. One problem: Their main suspect was back in his home country of Iran, where extradition back to the U.S. would be impossible to get. This is when Murphy, Deputy DA Heather Brown and Peters to hatch a plan to lure him to an extraditable country via his estranged wife, Cortney Shegerian.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? More than many of the ABC News Studios docuseries we’ve seen on Hulu, Wicked Game has a 20/20 feel, probably because interviews with Barnes, Shegerian, her attorney and Nayeri are all taken from a 2020 episode of the newsmagazine.
Our Take: While the case being explained in Wicked Game: Devil In The Desert is complex, it’s also hard to get into, even for true crime fans. The three parts take on a different aspect of the case: How authorities found out about Nayeri, how they got Shegerian to lure him out of Iran, then his trial and his shocking escape from prison. But as complex as the case may seem, it feels like one that was better served in that hour-long 20/20 format than as a two-plus hour, three-episode docuseries.
The new information comes mostly from Murphy, Brown and Peters, and while it fills in the nuts and bolts of the investigation, it doesn’t add anything that’s particularly explosive to the narrative that we didn’t get from Shegerian and Nayeri himself five years ago. The most interesting parts of this story are how manipulative Nayeri was and what he did with Shegerian to get her to help him commit this abduction. The second episode comes alive mainly because of what we hear from Shegerian, not because of the back-patting narrative of the detective and prosecutors.
Another thing that made the story tough to get into was the fact that this was basically a crime between medical marijuana dealers. Not that what happened to Michael S. should happen to anyone, but the narrative that Murphy, Brown and Peters give that led to Nayeri’s attack on Michael S. just left us cold. Michael S. didn’t want to buy Nayeri’s weed for what Nayeri thought it was worth. It’s just not the kind of motive that a true crime docuseries generally deals with, and that leads us back to just how manipulative and sociopathic Nayeri was. The fact that he’s not even the center of the story until episode 2 makes us think that the series misplaced where its center was going to be.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Murphy says, “I’m thinking we’re done” because Nayeri was living in Iran when they were looking for him.
Sleeper Star: The best part of the series is Shegerian’s interview, even if it’s five years old.
Most Pilot-y Line: At the start of the first episode, Murphy explains what he does as a Deputy District Attorney. If that doesn’t feel like a time-filler, nothing does. We get some background on Brown and Peters, too, none of which was at all necessary.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Honestly, if you want to find out about the Nayeri case, go find the 20/20 episode about it. Wicked Game: Devil In The Desert adds in some information, but mostly from the perspective of how the investigation proceeded, which in this case is the less interesting part of the story.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
