D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!

James Corden's shop wanted the skyjacking to be fun

Fulwell 73 spent years on The Late Late Show and Hulu's The Kardashians. Deadline's Peter White, in June 2022, reported the company's first true-crime order. Netflix wanted four episodes on the man who hijacked a Northwest Orient jet in November 1971, took $200,000, and jumped. Marina Zenovich directed through PMZ Pictures. Leo Pearlman and Sheldon Lazarus exec produced for Fulwell 73. P.G. Morgan exec produced with Zenovich. The limited series landed on July 13. Pearlman sold it as "stylish, original and most importantly fun." That word is the gossip. latestnetflix.com's take is that A Kardashians producer called the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation a good time.

Zenovich had just finished HBO Max's The Way Down. She called Cooper "an all-American adventure with many bizarre twists and turns." The papers named him D.B. Cooper. He boarded as Dan Cooper. He put the plane down in Seattle, collected the cash and four parachutes, took off again, and jumped somewhere between Portland and Reno. Nobody on board was hurt. The FBI suspended the active hunt in 2016 and left a clip-on tie, a mother-of-pearl tie clip, and eight cigarette butts in the public file. Deadline also walked through the usual other names. A Boeing employee. WWII paratrooper Kenneth Peter Christiansen. Leather worker Lynn Doyle Cooper. Recreational pilot Barbara Dayton, who had gender reassignment surgery in 1969. The series interviews Jonna Mendez, former CIA chief of disguise, plus authors Geoffrey Gray and Bryan Burrough. Blake Neely wrote the score. EJ Kang, whose graphics work includes The Morning Show and Game of Thrones, handled the silhouettes. ,

The real running character is Tom Colbert. He wrote The Last Master Outlaw and spent a decade trying to prove retired pilot Robert Rackstraw did the jump. Episode two is titled Innocent Men Don't Hide in Storage Bins. In Netflix's trailer Colbert says, "My team has no doubt we have found D.B. Cooper." Joel Keller at Decider watched him describe nearly burning family savings on the chase. Gray, who wrote Skyjack, tells the same series that the case can shove a careful journalist into a hole where little still makes sense. Rackstraw, on archival tape, is asked if he is Cooper. "I can't talk about things like that," he says. Colbert's identification is his claim. The Bureau did not take it. , ,

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes sat at 91 percent from a small pile of reviews. The audience meter sat at 28. Sleuths wanted a name. A lot of viewers got other people's obsession instead. Netflix's four titles tell you the shape. Take the Money and Jump. Innocent Men Don't Hide in Storage Bins. Seeing Jesus in the Toast, after the FBI dumped its files. Cooperland, which wanders into a Canadian comic-book hero who shares the alias. Keller even flagged a stretch on 1971 stewardess labor as a different documentary hiding in this one. The official trailer still plays the folk-hero line. "There's something badass about that." Netflix files the show as a 2022 TV-14 documentary. The man who jumped is still missing. , , ,