‘Cold Case Files: DNA Speaks’ Review: Old Crimes, New Science

You can’t really describe the reality-crime series “Cold Case Files” as having nine lives, but it has enjoyed a few. Originally available on A&E, it became one of that network’s most popular programs when it began airing in 1999. Danny Glover replaced Bill Kurtis as the voice of the show in a 2017 revival, again on A&E (the show has also been available on Netflix), but Mr. Kurtis eventually returned in 2021 after 15 years. In what might be called a re-re-reboot, Mr. Kurtis and his longtime vehicle have pulled into Hulu, where the subject is DNA.

“Cold Case Files: DNA Speaks,” a new 10-episode documentary series, follows a familiar stylistic format and the usual steps toward a resolution: the commission of a crime; the difficulties in solving it; interviews with survivors, observers and investigators; followed by the solution—or not—to whatever outrage has been perpetrated. In “DNA Speaks” the crimes are murder, so there are no victims to be interviewed, and the cases (at least in the three episodes made available for review) went unsolved for decades.

Mr. Kurtis is a familiar quantity, a onetime host of “The CBS Morning News” and since 2014 the regular announcer on the NPR program “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” where his mellifluous vocal qualities are occasionally a source of amusement, especially to the show’s host, Peter Sagal. His contributions to “DNA Speaks” range from the canned (“Police scour the neighborhood searching for the suspect”) to the cracker-barrel. (“Leads dry up like a Florida swamp in a drought”; the case was “colder than a freezing rain in Oregon winter.”) But Mr. Kurtis is really on hand as a comforting link to the show that his production company originally created.

The more substantial information is coming from the police investigators who have either never let a murder go completely cold or picked up an investigation when cold-case squads were introduced to certain police departments. There’s a sentiment to the new “Cold Case Files” that might be described as the opposite of schadenfreude—listening to the friends and families of murder victims, sometimes to what feels like an intrusive, voyeuristic extent, makes one glad not to be them, though you also wish they weren’t them. Still, the way cases are eventually solved is engrossing, because the technology behind the use of DNA evidence has been evolving over the life of these cases: If the technology had stalled, they might never have been solved.

Where a group such as the Innocence Project emphasizes the noble work of exonerating the wrongly convicted through that very same type of evidence, “DNA Speaks” puts a markedly different spin on the subject. During the search for the killer of 14-year-old Nacole Smith in 1995 Atlanta there are several suspects, any one of whom a viewer is sure will be the guilty party. But time after time the DNA evidence—gathered sometimes through deliciously surreptitious means—clears them. One of the knotty problems facing police is the use of CODIS, or Combined DNA Index System, a national database of DNA profiles. It’s a marvelous tool, but unless someone has already been arrested and had his or her DNA taken, that person isn’t likely to be in the system. And a lot of people don’t want to be, even if they’re innocent. “If you got nothing to hide,” asks one detective, “if you didn’t do the crime, why wouldn’t you give me a sample of your DNA?” There are many answers to that, and “DNA Speaks” has only an hour per episode.

—Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic.