![]() ![]() In “Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron” (9 p.m. Sometimes producers know more about aspects of a subject than they have time/space to include, but when I asked Cutler about Murphy’s Pittsburgh background last month after a press conference for the series during the Television Critics Association winter 2023 press tour, Cutler didn’t have more details to offer.ĭirector James Cameron (“Avatar”) takes challenges to the accuracy of his films seriously. “Murf the Surf” dispatches with his time in Western Pennsylvania in a few sentences. Murphy moved to McKeesport as a teen and displayed musical talent and tennis skills and was offered a tennis scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh, but he dropped out his freshman year and moved to Miami where his troubles with the law took root. Unfortunately he doesn’t offer much because he died in 2020 shortly after the first in what was surely intended to be a series of interviews. It’s a dramatic entrance when the first talking head appears and it’s Murf himself. Cutler chooses not to show talking heads on camera for most of the series, preferring instead to rely on voiceover on top of still images and video (archival footage, animation and some re-created stills and video, but the re-creations are not marked so there’s no way to tell what’s a re-creation and what’s not). That’s a decent hook, but some of what follows - including murder - remains unsolved.ĭirector/executive producer R.J. Sunday on MGM+ linear, MGM+ streaming) is the story of Jack Roland Murphy (AKA “Murf the Surf”) who was part of a band of surfers who staged a jewel heist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1964. “Murf the Surf: Jewels, Jesus and Mayhem in the U.S.A.” (10 p.m. That might make sense if there was a lot of other story to tell, but it turns out to be a generally overlong, unsatisfying program. ![]() While the story of “Murf the Surf” runs through Pittsburgh, the four-part docu-series devotes little attention to Murf’s time in Western Pennsylvania. ![]()
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