TV Show Review - Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (Mini Series)

Season: Mini Series
Genre: Crime/ Documentary
Number of episodes: 4
Year: 2021
Starring: Viveca Chow, Judy Ho, Artemis Snow, Kim Cooper, Josh Dean, Greg Kading, Santiago Lopez, John Jordan, Tim Marcia, Goud Mungin, Amy Price, Jason Tovar

Description: College student and tourist Elisa Lam vanishes, leaving behind all of her possessions in her hotel room. The Cecil Hotel grows in infamy.

Review: Behind many Los Angeles hotel facades lie extraordinary stories. The Cecil Hotel, in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, doesn’t have a rosy reputation: the stately building built in the 1920s is a place where bad things keep happening, over and over again. Suicides, overdoses, murder, you name it.  
The four-part series takes as its starting point the 2003 disappearance of 22-year-old Elisa Lam. The Canadian, traveling through California that year, disappears one day. In the last footage that has surfaced of her, necessarily released by the LAPD as the investigation stalls, we see her exhibiting strange behavior in an elevator at the Cecil Hotel. Then the makers, known for “The Ted Bundy Tapes”, present through testimony and reconstruction how the Cecil Hotel has been breeding ground for misery for years. Surrounded by Skid Row, the bastion of homeless America.
Tourists who book a cheap room at the Cecil Hotel are in for a shock: some 8000 to 10 000 homeless people (including a tranche of mental health patients and ex-convicts) reside in downtown L.A. For the past several decades, the city council has been deciding that that place, Skid Row, would become the drain on the City of Angels. If you don’t want to see the other person’s misery, you can simply avoid Skid Row. This is, of course, abominable public policy, but equally appropriate for Los Angeles, where the rich of the world have sut themselves away in their gated communities.
That’s exactly where Elisa Lam ends up. In a tumbledown hotel room. Perhaps the room where serial killer Richard Ramirez, the famous ‘Night Stalker’, once spent three weeks in hiding. In that sense, it’s no surprise that the Cecil Hotel is popping up in documentaries and fiction (just look at season five of “American Horror Story”). The structure itself is pure Los Angeles noir. The makers play with this emphatically, so that the series constantly straddles the line between documentary and sensation.
“Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” is a pretty creepy documentary series, that I watched completely in one sitting.