Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story’ On Netflix, The Second Season Of The Love Gone Wrong Anthology Series

The second season of the Dirty John anthology focuses on the real-life Betty Broderick case. In 1989, she murdered her ex-husband Dan and his new wife Linda, and it took two trials to convict her of murder, with the first having a hung jury. Like the first season of Dirty John, this season is based on a podcast produced by the Los Angeles Times. This version of the story (there was a TV movie starring Meredith Baxter in 1992) was created by veteran TV writer Alexandra Cunningham, debuted on the USA Network in June 2020, and just landed on Netflix.

DIRTY JOHN: THE BETTY BRODERICK STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As Cyndi Lauper plays, we see closeups of a woman brushing her hair and perfecting her makeup, as if she’s about to go on a date.

The Gist: It’s 1986 in La Jolla, California. Betty Broderick (Amanda Peet) isn’t going out on a date, she’s having a meeting with her lawyer, Bob Munro (Andy Buckley). Munro flew down to San Diego from Los Angeles to have a meeting with her soon-to-be-ex-husband Dan (Christian Slater) and his lawyers to figure out how to split the proceeds from the sale of the house they bought together. One problem: Betty doesn’t want to go into the lawyer’s office and face Dan… and she doesn’t want to sell the house. When Munro gets frustrated by Betty’s refusal to sign the agreement, Dan tells Munro that he’s finally getting how frustrating his wife can be.

Betty still holds out a flicker of hope that her marriage can be salvaged and that their four kids can have their family back together instead of being shuttled from Dan’s new house to the house he said they should buy in La Jolla. But when Dan, who got an MD then immediately went to Harvard Law School, and is now a superstar attorney, wants something, he’s pretty cunning when it comes to getting it. Which is why, as Betty is talking with her visiting parents after the meeting, she gets a call from Munro to tell her that Dan got a court order to sell the house without her permission.

This sends her into a rage. She literally drives her truck into the front door of Dan’s new house, with her daughters inside. Dan calls himself a doctor, even though he has an MD but not a license, and tells the cops that arrive that she should be put on a 72-hour psychiatric hold. We see her being interviewed by the intake doctor as she’s in her pink robe. It feels like she’s been supporting Dan during their whole marriage, sacrificing her dreams for his. And when she meets with friends, they tell her that she shouldn’t be so obsessed with Dan or getting him back and just rebuild her life.

But she’s determined to tell Dan just how much he’s hurt her, and when she finds out that a) he’s not paying Munro his retainer, despite blocking Betty from most of the family money, b) sent their sons to a psychiatrist to deal with their “crazy” mother, and c) he’s decided to go for a “bifurcated” divorce, where the divorce is granted first and the property settlement is worked out later, there is very little stopping her at this point from leaving a series of curse-filled, ranting messages on his answering machine… and worse.

Our Take: Cunningham has given us a very juicy retelling of Broderick’s story, and made a smart choice by starting it when their divorce is about to be finalized, as Dan refuses to tell her about court dates so he can start the bifurcated divorce and get main custody of their kids without her presence. While Slater plays Dan with the appropriate amount of arrogance and smarm — he and his divorce attorney chum it up with the judge right before their one-sided divorce hearing — Peet very effectively communicates the barely-contained rage that’s constantly bubbling out of the perfectly-coiffed and put-together Betty.

Rocking ’80s mom jeans and a blonde wig, Peet’s putting together one of the best performances of her career, and it’s evident from the first scene. It stitches together what has made her so watchable in past roles. Sometimes she’s been intense (Studio 60), other times vulnerable (Brockmire) and still other times barely holding her anger in (Togetherness). Here, she does all three, and she’s brilliant doing so.

Peet doesn’t play Betty as purely batshit crazy, which would be the temptation. Betty’s unhinged nature comes from two decades of having to push down her dreams and interests to support Dan’s dreams and their family. That pain, coupled with the irrational desire to salvage her marriage, come to the fore when we see Betty contemplate everything that’s gone down between them, up to and including Dan having her committed.

But that doesn’t mean that when the batshit does come out, Peet underplays it. Just the opposite; she leans into Betty’s crazy, making her rants even more manic and pressured than you’d expect from someone in Betty’s position. Peet is adept at going back and forth between being justifiably wounded and irrationally lashing out, and it makes the fictional version of Betty into someone more than just a woman scorned.

What the eight-episode season will do is go back to when Betty and Dan met and married in the sixties, then rocket forward to when Dan hired Linda Kolkena (Rachel Keller) to be his assistant — and then starts an affair with her — which starts Betty down the path that will lead her to murdering the both of them. It’s a structure that will be intriguing to watch, as we get to see Betty at her peak of stress and irrationality before we get to see how this all got built by both halves of the Brodericks’ marriage.

Sex and Skin: Nothing, unless you consider blind rage sexy.

Parting Shot: Betty is talking about Dan in the present tense, then you hear someone say, “But he’s dead, right?” Then we see she’s being questioned by a detective. “I can’t believe it only took one bullet to kill Dan Broderick,” she says.

Sleeper Star: We’re always happy to see Missi Pyle, who plays Karen Kintner, the friend who encourages Betty to get a hobby and date. There’s also Lena Georgas, who plays Betty’s widowed friend Janet Ravis, who encourages her friend to go out and get laid to help her forget about Dan. Her influence should be interesting to watch going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: After she gets home from the singles’ bar she was at with Janet, a drunk Betty calls up Dan and starts telling him about a mutual friend who popped into her head when she was at the bar (though it looks more like she saw Dan in a tux). Dan starts laughing and sharing the memory with her, then says, “Thanks for that, Bets. I needed that,” then hung up. Yes, it shows how vulnerable Betty is, but is it also supposed to show how ruthless Dan is? That he can give her hope about their marriage or at least their divorce right before he yanks all hope away? We’re not sure about the purpose of that scene.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Amanda Peet’s performance is more than enough to put Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story on a season pass. But Broderick’s story is an intriguing one, and it looks like it’ll be told in a way that will show that some of her simmering rage didn’t just come out of the blue.

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, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story On Netflix