Synopsis: When 16‑year‑old Skylar Neese disappears from her West Virginia home, the search for answers exposes hidden tensions among her closest friends
Director: Clair Titley
Rated: TVMA
Running Length: 3 episodes
Series Review in Brief: Hulu’s three-part Skylar Neese doc is well-assembled and genuinely disturbing — it just stretches a two-episode story into three. The case at its center remains one of true crime’s most senseless, and the series honors that without fully escaping its own bloat.
Review:
Skylar Neese was sixteen years old, a high school sophomore in Star City, West Virginia, and by every account a funny, sharp, social kid with a close circle and a life full of the ordinary chaos of being a teenager in 2012. She had a best friend in Sheila Eddy and a close friend in Rachel Shoaf. She had parents, Dave and Mary, who knew her well enough to know something was immediately wrong when she did not come home. She was not a runaway. She was not troubled. She was just gone.
Hulu’s three-part docuseries Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese, directed by Clair Titley, starts there — with Skylar as a person — and that is the right place to start.
Building Skylar's World
The first episode does patient, necessary work. Through social media posts, home video, text message reconstructions, and interviews with classmates and people who knew Skylar in school, the series builds her out as a real teenager before it asks you to grieve her. She comes through clearly: opinionated, loyal, a little guarded with adults, completely at ease with her friends.
Sheila Eddy and Rachel Shoaf are introduced here as exactly what they appeared to be — Skylar’s people. The three of them move through the footage as a unit, the kind of friendship that looks airtight from the outside. The series is smart enough to let that impression sit for a while. It does not rush to complicate it.
The broader community that surfaces in the early episodes — classmates, neighbors, school administrators, people who watched the search unfold in real time — gives the series a sense of place that a lot of true crime docs skip past. Star City is not just a backdrop. The series earns it as a setting, which makes the events that follow feel more grounded and more painful.
The Parents, and What the Series Owes Them
Dave and Mary Neese are the emotional spine of Friends Like These, and the series is at its best when it stays close to them. They are plainspoken and precise, two people who reported their daughter missing the morning after she disappeared because they knew — they just knew — that this was not a choice she made. Watching them describe those early days, the waiting, the not knowing, is the kind of television that stays with you.
Skylar was their only child. That fact does not need to be underlined. It is present in every conversation they have, in every answer they give, in the specific way they talk about her in the present tense and then catch themselves. The series gives them room in the first episode and in the third. The second episode is where it moves away from them — and that is exactly where it starts to feel the strain.
The Investigators and the Crack in the Case
The law enforcement interviews are where the series finds its procedural momentum. Police corporal Ronnie Gaskin is the standout — not because he performs grief or outrage, but because he does not. He describes what happened with the flat affect of someone who worked the case long enough to make peace with most of it, and then you see in certain moments that he has not made peace with all of it. That’s the texture good documentary filmmaking is after.
Director Titley, who previously made The Contestant, structures the series across three episodes — “The Disappearance,” “The Betrayal,” and “The Truth” — with title cards that are ominous precisely because they are so matter-of-fact. BAFTA-winning producer Josie Besbrode and editors Kevin Austin and Jane Hodge keep the first and third episodes tight and purposeful. The drone photography, surveillance footage, and social media reconstruction all serve the story rather than decorating it.
The investigation builds through small cracks — a cell phone record here, a behavioral shift there, a moment in an interview room where something does not hold. The series is careful not to hand you the answer before the case does. It earns the reveal rather than telegraphing it, which is a real discipline in a format that often can’t resist a dramatic third-act drop.
Where It Stretches Thin
The second episode is the problem. The series is producing for three hours of television, and there are stretches in the middle where that math shows. Some procedural detail that would have made a compelling ten minutes in a tighter cut gets extended past the point where it’s adding something new. A 2026 true crime audience has watched a lot of these. The series knows what it has — it just occasionally forgets that patience has limits.
The parents largely disappear in this middle section, replaced by case mechanics that are thorough without always being essential. It is not bad television. It is just television that loses the thread it started with, the human one, at exactly the moment it should be pulling tighter.
The Weight at the End
The third episode recovers, and recovers well. The legal proceedings, the testimony, the moment the full picture assembles — the series handles all of it with the gravity it deserves. This is where individuals stop being characters in a Skylar’s story and become something the series has to reckon with directly. Their sentences are on screen. The specificity of what happened, and why, is on screen. The series does not editorialize. It does not have to.
This is not the first time the Skylar Neese case has been documented, but Titley’s version is the most complete portrait of the full community around her — the parents, the investigators, the classmates, the town. For anyone coming to the story fresh, it will land hard. For anyone who followed it in 2012 and 2013, it fills in corners that earlier coverage left dark.
Skylar’s Law, the West Virginia legislation born from this case, gets a single quiet acknowledgment near the close. It earns its place. Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese comes recommended for true crime audiences, with the caveat that episode two tests your patience before episode three earns it back. The case at the center of this series has no satisfying explanation. Only a senseless one. The series is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.
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