emotional storytelling Archives

In July 2012, 16-year-old Skylar Neese climbed out of her bedroom window in Star City, West Virginia in the middle of the night, without taking the essentials she would have needed to stay away for long. She never returned. What initially presented as a missing persons case, shaped by uncertainty, community search efforts, and quiet hope, slowly unraveled into something far more disturbing.

Surveillance footage showed Skylar getting into an unknown car just after 12:30 a.m. For months, there were no clear answers. Investigators and her family searched while social media posts from her inner circle hinted at tension but revealed nothing explicit. To the outside world, it looked like a disappearance suspended in ambiguity.

More than six months later, the truth emerged with chilling clarity. Skylar had been murdered by two of her best friends, Shelia Eddy and Rachel Shoaf, in a premeditated attack. They had driven her across state lines into Pennsylvania, brought knives along with cleaning supplies and a plan, and carried out the killing after counting to three. The brutality of the act was shocking. What made it even more unsettling was how ordinary everything surrounding it seemed.

Both eventually pleaded guilty. Shoaf confessed after a mental breakdown and led investigators to Skylar’s body, which had been hidden less than 30 miles from her home. She received a 30-year sentence with the possibility of parole. Eddy later pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

The case quickly became one of the most disturbing examples of violence rooted not in strangers or sudden impulse, but in intimacy. These were girls who had grown up together, who had shared daily life, routines, and trust. At one point, one of them had even helped distribute missing person flyers for Skylar.

In the years since, the Skylar Neese case has been told through documentaries, news coverage, and the familiar machinery of true crime. The facts are widely known. The outline is clear. It even led to legislative change, with Skylar’s Law reforming how missing children alerts are issued in West Virginia. And yet, something about the emotional reality of the story, what it felt like to be inside those friendships and inside that moment of adolescence, has often remained just out of reach.

In true crime, the shape of a story is often familiar long before its emotional reality is understood.
There is a victim, a crime, a search for answers, and eventually a public narrative that settles over everything like cement. The facts may remain, but the feeling of the people inside the story can get flattened in the process. That is part of what makes Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese, now streaming on Hulu, stand out from the increasingly crowded field of crime docuseries.

Rather than approaching Skylar Neese’s murder primarily as a procedural or a mystery, the three-part series looks inward. Told through social media posts, intimate interviews, and Skylar’s own words, it shifts the lens away from armchair detection and toward adolescence itself: the volatility of teenage friendship, the intensity of belonging, and the emotional stakes of being young in a world where everything is felt in public and archived forever.

That approach is central to director Clair Titley’s vision for the series.

“This story has been told before in various different ways,” Titley told me, “in quite a true-crime kind of way in the past before.”

But from the moment she came aboard, she said, the intention was to tell it “from the inside out,” particularly through the perspective of Skylar and the peers who surrounded her.

That distinction matters. It is the difference between documenting what happened and trying to understand what it felt like.

For Titley, that meant foregrounding Skylar not as a plot device, but as a person. It also meant resisting some of true crime’s most familiar visual and emotional habits. Instead of leaning into darkness and severity at every turn, the series draws from teen films, adolescent color palettes, and a score that evokes the emotional confusion of being 15 or 16 before subtly curdling into something more unsettling.

The result is a series less interested in the neat moral architecture of “good” and “bad” than in the disorienting emotional ecosystem that teenage life can become.

A Digital World Hiding in Plain Sight

That same sensibility extends to the series’ use of digital material.

Social posts are not treated as decorative evidence or a flashy modern storytelling device. They are woven directly into the world the teenagers inhabited, appearing almost as part of the physical environment itself. The effect is not simply aesthetic. It reflects a deeper truth about the period and about adolescence online: that so much of what mattered was visible, but not necessarily legible to the adults around them.

In that sense, Friends Like These is not just about a crime. It is also about a generational blind spot.

Former FBI investigator and polygraph expert Rob Ambrosini, who was involved in the Skylar Neese case, spoke to that shift in stark terms.

“Students, kids at that particular time, high schoolers, adolescents, teenagers, are using it as a way to kind of shape their reality,” he said.
“It’s kind of like this cathartic dump of, well, this is what’s going on in my life, and they just throw it out there.”

From an investigative standpoint, those posts could provide timestamps, context, tension, and avenues for questioning. But Ambrosini’s comments also point to something the series seems especially interested in: teenagers were often expressing themselves in plain sight, even when the adults around them were not fully equipped to understand what they were seeing.

That tension between expression and interpretation runs through the entire series.

Ambrosini, who spent 24 years with the FBI and conducted more than 3,000 polygraph examinations, described cases involving young people as requiring a different kind of care. The work, he explained, is not simply about extracting facts. It is about slowing down, building trust, and recognizing that younger subjects may respond to pressure, confusion, or even a desire to please the adult in front of them.

In a series like this, that perspective is useful not only because it explains investigative realities, but because it complicates the public appetite for easy answers. High-profile cases often generate a demand for certainty, transparency, and immediate coherence. Real life rarely offers those things so cleanly.

Returning Skylar’s Humanity

If Ambrosini helps articulate the investigative dimension of the case, Eric Finch brings the emotional one.

Finch, who was friends with Skylar, does something especially important in both the series and in conversation: he returns her humanity to the center of the story.

When I asked what made Skylar laugh or what her everyday conversations felt like, his answer was not polished or theatrical. It was the opposite. He remembered the ordinary rhythm of constant communication, the kind of back-and-forth that would probably seem boring to outsiders but meant everything in the moment.

That detail, small as it is, says more about teenage closeness than any dramatic summary could.

He also spoke about what bonded them. Not just personality, but circumstance. Both came from lower-income backgrounds, and both understood early what it meant to have to work for spending money while other kids seemed to have things handed to them.

It was one of the subtler insights from my conversations around the series, but one of the most revealing. Adolescence is often discussed in broad emotional terms, but class, labor, and social pressure shape teenage belonging just as much as hormones and drama do.

Finch was also especially thoughtful when speaking about how adults tend to misread teenage relationships.

“It is teenage drama,” he said. “But from the teenager, that is life, and that is the most important thing.”

That may be the clearest articulation of what Friends Like These is ultimately trying to honor.

The Emotional Stakes of Being Young

Adults often dismiss teenage conflicts as temporary, melodramatic, or unserious. And from a distance, maybe they are. But inside that period of life, friendship can feel total. Rejection can feel existential. Betrayal can feel world-ending.

When those emotions unfold in a digital environment that records, amplifies, and circulates them, the line between ordinary adolescent volatility and something far more dangerous can become harder to recognize.

That does not mean the series excuses what happened. It means it is trying to understand the world in which it happened without reducing everyone involved to archetypes.

That is one of Titley’s more notable achievements here. So much true crime flattens people into roles: victim, suspect, best friend, villain. But in speaking with her, it was clear she wanted to resist that impulse.

Her emphasis was on emotional truth, complexity, and on allowing Skylar to exist as more than the tragedy that ultimately consumed her public image.

A Different Kind of True Crime

It is a difficult balance.

Too much stylization, and the material risks feeling exploitative. Too much reverence for familiar true-crime form, and the human core gets buried beneath grim mechanics. Friends Like These tries to live in the tension between those poles. It wants to be psychologically attentive without becoming indulgent, visually expressive without losing moral seriousness.

The result is a series that feels less concerned with sensationalizing a notorious case than with re-examining the conditions that made it possible: the fragility of friendship, the blindness of adults, the alienating half-public reality of social media, and the sheer emotional intensity of being young.

There is, of course, no shortage of true-crime stories competing for attention. Many arrive with the same promise of revelation, the same dark aesthetic, and the same invitation to decode trauma from the safety of a couch.

Friends Like These is more compelling when it resists that mode.

Its strongest instinct is not toward shock, but toward proximity. It asks viewers not just to observe what happened to Skylar Neese, but to sit with the unstable emotional world that surrounded her.

And in doing so, it lands somewhere more unsettling than a typical whodunit.

Not because the facts are unknown.
But because the feelings, even now, remain difficult to fully absorb.

There are shows you watch along with everyone else.

And then there are shows that, for one reason or another, never fully make it out into the world.

The Savant falls into the second category.

Originally developed as a limited series for Apple TV+, the crime thriller—created by Melissa James Gibson and inspired by a real-life article about a woman infiltrating online extremist groups—was set for release before being pulled back entirely. No rollout. No weekly drops. No real audience reception in the traditional sense.

Which makes the experience of watching it—and speaking to the people who made it—feel different from the start.

Because this is a show that exists, but in a way, also doesn’t.

I was one of the few people given access to see it, and then had the opportunity to speak with Jessica Chastain and Nnamdi Asomugha about what drew them to the project, what it demanded from them, and what they hope people take from it, whenever and however it finds its way to an audience.

A Story That Started With Reality

For Jessica Chastain, the entry point into The Savant wasn’t just the role.

It was the story itself.

She described coming across the article that inspired the series and being struck by the idea that there are people whose work exists entirely in the shadows of the internet, embedding themselves inside dangerous online spaces in order to prevent real-world violence. It wasn’t just the concept that stood out to her, but the fact that it was centered on a woman balancing that work with a personal life.

That combination, the scale of the responsibility and the intimacy of the character’s life outside of it, is what made her want to be involved not just as an actor, but as a producer.

From her perspective, it wasn’t enough to simply perform in the story. She wanted to help shape how it was brought to screen.

And that meant committing to a process that was significantly larger than a typical film.

Building Something Long-Form

When I asked her about the difference between producing a series and producing a film, her answer was straightforward.

It’s the same job.

Just amplified.

Instead of telling a story over the course of a couple of hours, you’re building something that stretches across multiple episodes. More characters, more moving pieces, more time spent developing the world and shaping the narrative. It becomes a longer, more intensive process at every stage, from development to production.

She walked through how the project evolved from a single article into a full series. First comes the idea. Then the pitch. Then the process of finding a home for it. Then the development. Then the actual production.

Each step adding another layer.

By the time you arrive at the finished product, you’re not just looking at a single piece of work. You’re looking at something that has been built over years.

A Character Living Between Worlds

On the other side of the conversation, Nnamdi Asomugha spoke about his character, Charlie, and what it meant to exist within a story where so much is happening beneath the surface.

Charlie is navigating a family dynamic shaped by secrets, responsibilities, and the kind of pressure that doesn’t always present itself directly. For Asomugha, the connection to the role came less from the specifics of the storyline and more from the emotional structure around it.

He talked about the experience of being away from home for extended periods during production and then returning to reintegrate into his own family life. That rhythm—leaving, returning, recalibrating—mirrored what his character goes through in a different context.

The circumstances may not be the same, but the feeling of trying to reestablish your place within a family after time away is something that translates.

That sense of grounding becomes important in a show built around a subject that most people don’t encounter directly.

Work That Happens Out of Sight

Both actors kept returning to a similar idea when talking about what they hope audiences take from the series.

Awareness.

For Chastain, it’s about understanding the reality of what exists online, particularly for younger people, and the importance of paying attention to it. The idea that the digital world is not separate from real-world consequences, and that there are people actively working to monitor and prevent harm within those spaces.

For Asomugha, it’s about recognizing the individuals doing that work.

The people who operate behind the scenes, often without recognition, whose job is to prevent something from happening rather than respond after it already has.

It’s a different kind of heroism.

One that doesn’t announce itself.

One that, in many cases, people don’t even realize exists.

A Project in Limbo

What makes The Savant especially unusual is that these conversations are happening around a show that has not been released in the traditional sense.

It was developed. Produced. Completed.

And then, just before it was meant to reach audiences, it was pulled back.

There’s no standard way to talk about something in that position.

There’s no audience reaction to point to. No rollout to contextualize it. No shared experience of people watching it at the same time and forming a collective response.

Instead, what you’re left with is the work itself, and the people who made it.

And in this case, those people are talking about a project that, for now, exists in a kind of in-between space.

Not fully public.

Not entirely unseen.

Just waiting.

Final Thoughts

By the end of my conversation with Jessica Chastain and Nnamdi Asomugha, what stood out most wasn’t the scale of the production or the unusual circumstances surrounding the show’s release.

It was the intention behind it.

A story pulled from reality.

A character built around that reality.

A process that expanded from a single article into something much larger.

And a group of people trying to bring attention to a world that most audiences don’t regularly see.

Whatever happens next with The Savant, whether it finds its way back to audiences or remains in its current state, the work behind it is already there.

And for now, that’s the version of it that exists.

emotional storytelling

Inside Friends Like These: Hulu’s Skylar Neese Docuseries Reframes a Familiar True-Crime Story Through Teenage Intimacy