The initial installment of Netflix’s anthology sequence “Crime Scene” explores the dark historical past of downtown Los Angeles’ Cecil Hotel — property to infamous serial killers, numerous murders, suicides and overdoses — via the mysterious 2013 loss of life of 21-calendar year-old Canadian college college student Elisa Lam. Her entire body was discovered wedged in just one of the h2o tanks atop the 19-story resort that winter, and although the L.A. coroner dominated her dying accidental, the strange instances all around her demise continue to seize the imagination of real-crime buffs and Angelenos.

Directed by Joe Berlinger (“Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes”), “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” purports to deconstruct the instances around Lam’s loss of life, shedding new mild on an outdated secret. The Cecil’s sordid and violent earlier serves as a creepy backdrop for this especially disturbing slice of L.A. history.

The 4-part collection about a lodge that is not accurately haunted, and a lady who could or may possibly not have been murdered, is Netflix’s newest offering considering that developing alone as a destination for real crime. But it is hardly the most effective of the bunch. For the reason that when there are fundamentally two stories right here, neither is told in a terribly compelling way.

To begin with, “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” is a intriguing journey into the city’s previous, from its aspirations as a respectable business and enjoyment hub to its garish displays of prosperity and glaring class disparities.

Chronicled listed here is the century-aged hotel’s decline from a well known tourist spot to a seedy crash pad for L.A.’s underbelly, together with the chilling reality that “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez resided in the Cecil all through his horrific killing spree in the summertime of 1985. Built in 1924, the Cecil was once a stylish location for people to continue to be but commenced to drop in the ’30s and ’40s, as did the place around the grand resort. Now Remain on Key — it was rebranded in 2011 — the resort sits on the edge of skid row. It is also the past put Lam was seen alive.

A woman walks down an empty hallway.

A scene from Episode 3 of “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Resort.”

(Netflix)

The sequence, nevertheless, fails to persuasively entwine the hotel’s past with Lam’s demise, relying as a substitute on the salacious facets of both of those storylines to push the narrative.

At the time of her dying, Lam, the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a student at the University of British Columbia, was vacationing in Los Angeles, wherever she had found a hotel that suit her meager spending plan. Then the tale will get fuzzy, just before turning downright ghoulish.

“The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” falls in love with the criminal offense lore features of the scenario, and feels extra exploitative than revealing, like a manufacturing from the far reaches of fundamental cable — but with a larger spending budget, far more archival footage and a narrative stretched out above various episodes. And compared with other thriving Netflix series that have tackled notorious situations from new angles (“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” “Jeffery Epstein: Filthy Rich”), “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” fails to illuminate significantly about the situations all around Lam’s death, even if the story by itself may well be unfamiliar to quite a few exterior Southern California. Netflix docuseries chronicling lesser-identified tragedies, such as “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” or “The Keepers,” ought to have been applied as guiding lights. They infused the whodunit features of their central scenarios with dogged research, nuanced subplots and psychological attachment to the victims.

The story about Lam and the Cecil Resort not often goes that deep, even though it does attribute interviews with a previous lodge manager, earlier inhabitants, retired LAPD homicide detectives, historians and novice social media sleuths who are nevertheless obsessed with the scenario.

Lam’s disappearance and loss of life grew to become a preoccupation amid genuine-criminal offense podcasters and beginner Reddit sleuths immediately after video went viral of her behaving unusually within a Cecil Lodge elevator on the day of her disappearance. The LAPD had unveiled the footage, which was captured by an elevator surveillance digital camera, in the hope that it could spur leads in the situation. It created a great number of theories from armchair detectives trying to get to clarify Lam’s actions on tape and join them with her loss of life.

A maintenance worker investigating guests’ problems about the lower strain and discolored h2o coming out of their taps led to the ugly discovery of Lam’s system in a h2o tank on the roof of the getting old creating. The collection would make a position of interviewing at the very least two visitors from that time who remember the funny style of the water when brushing their teeth, repeating significantly of what they’d currently reported in contemporaneous news clips involved in the sequence.

Tawdry details this sort of as these are the inventory-in-trade of fictional films and Tv series, and certainly various — like “Castle,” “How to Get Absent With Murder” and “American Horror Tale: Hotel” — have experienced plotlines reminiscent of the scenario. Soon after all, there’s a great deal of product to operate with. Or get dropped in, in the circumstance of “Crime Scene.”

‘Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel’

The place: Netflix

When: Whenever

Score: Not rated