D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!, directed by Marina Zenovich, is a 4-episode docuseries about the search for the infamous D.B. Cooper, the pseudonym for a well-dressed hijacker who took over a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle in November, 1971. During an era where airlines were hijacked at an increasingly rapid rate, Cooper succeeded in getting what he wanted and escaping, without hurting anyone on board. Fifty years later, he still hasn’t been caught, despite the best efforts of journalists and investigators.
Opening Shot: “San Diego, CA, 2013.” A shot of a marina in the city, then we see a truck pulling a boat, with police radio calls alerting officers to the truck’s arrival.
The Gist: Zenovich, also an executive producer on the series, uses animations, some reenactments, archival news footage, and interviews with people who have investigated the hijacking at various points during the past half century to tell what has become one of the most famous crime legends of all time. Cooper, a name given to the hijacker by the media even though he boarded the flight under the name “Dan Cooper,” managed to land the plane in Seattle, get the $200,000 and four parachutes he was asking for, get the flight back in the air, then jump out somewhere between Portland and Reno.
But the docuseries is as much about the people who have followed all the leads, and thought they came close to finding the person everyone knows as D.B. Cooper, only to be thwarted. One of them is Tom Colbert, who has spent the past decade-plus investigating the case, and who to this day thinks he has found Cooper and thinks he has the evidence to support him. But we also hear about Dick Briggs, a stocky man who claimed he was D.B. Cooper for decades, despite looking very different than eyewitnesses described the sunglass-and suit-wearing hijacker. Still, Colbert took that tip and investigated, and a former FBI agent specializing in polygraphs was brought in. But, like with every other suspect, there was a fatal flaw in the case that couldn’t be resolved.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? D.B. Cooper is so ingrained in pop culture, as the first episode shows, that references to him are everywhere. But in 2020 HBO had a film called The Mystery Of D.B. Cooper that’s the closest analogue to what this docuseries is.
Our Take: Most people know the basics of the D.B. Cooper case. He hijacked a plane, got what he demanded, and jumped out of the airliner midflight, never to be found again. So it was imperative of Zenovich to go beyond the basics of the case in D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?! Before the first 45-minute episode is up, that’s what she does. Over the half-century this legend has been alive, the details of the case and the person who actually did it become secondary to the search itself.
Why? Because the search brings in people like Colbert, who has nearly sacrificed his family’s life and savings in pursuit of the case. Or it brings in journalists like Geoffrey Gray, a respected journalist who wrote a book on his search; in retrospect, he feels that investigating the case sends people down a dark emotional hole where little makes sense to their rational selves.
Still, the first episode does end up zeroing in on Robert Rackstraw, who associated with Dick Briggs and seemed to fit the the description and profile of Cooper much more closely. Colbert seems convinced he’s the guy, but it seems doubtful that any closure will come from this series. But if it points out just how much this legend has grown drawn in so many people over the decades, it’ll be worth the close to three hours you’ll spend on it.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: In archival footage, Rackstraw is asked if he’s D.B. Cooper, and he says, “I can’t talk about things like that.”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the graphics team who created the Mad Men-style silhouette graphics showing Cooper jumping out of the plane, along with the music coordinator Blake Neely, who put together a score that is reminiscent of thrillers reaching from Albert Hitchcock’s days all the way to The Flight Attendant.
Most Pilot-y Line: There’s an entire section about how female flight attendants — stewardesses, as they were called then — were objectified, sexually harassed, over worked and underpaid back in 1971. Yes, that’s absolutely true and it’s a great topic for a different docuseries. But we’re not quite sure what that discussion has to do with Cooper and the hijacking.
Our Call: STREAM IT. D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?! is a stylish docuseries that fills in a lot of blanks about a legend that has made a permanent home in our pop culture firmament, and the investigation that’s no closer to being solved now than it was in 1971.
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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
