In 2003, 24-year-old Juan Catalan heard a knock at the door and opened it to find a SWAT team waiting to arrest him for the murder of a 16-year-old girl. Catalan claimed innocence and said he couldn’t have committed the crime because he was at Dodgers Stadium at the time of the murder, watching the Dodgers take on the Atlanta Braves. He presented a ticket stub to prove it but the police and the district attorney didn’t believe him.
And so, he sat in prison awaiting trial where he almost certainly would face the death penalty if convicted. His lawyer needed to find a way to prove his client was at Dodgers Stadium when he says he was and he looked to perhaps the most unlikely source of all in order to do so… Larry David.
Such is the topic of the new Netflix true crime documentary Long Shot. The trailer for the subscription service’s latest addition to the genre is out now.
Turns out that an HBO TV crew was at Dodgers Stadium that day filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The episode in question, “Carpool Lane,” revolved around Larry David hiring a prostitute so that he could use the carpool lane in order to get to the Dodgers game in time. The crew shot footage of multiple sections inside the stadium and somewhere in that footage was Catalan’s only hope of avoiding prison or even death.
The outcome of the case is somewhat well-known (you can read about it here if you don’t care about spoilers), but that doesn’t mean the story can’t be a compelling one. Netflix has become a master of the true crime doc in recent years (and even has a parody of the genre on the way as well).
Long Shot debuts September 29.
