• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 8, 2021

Once upon a time, a rag doll was a children’s toy. 

The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary on my desk traces the origins of this two-word phrase to 1850 and provides a simple, straightforward definition: n: a stuffed usually painted cloth doll.

With 1850 as a starting point, in 171 years we have gone from that rag doll to “Ragdoll” (one word), a new serial-killer drama that starts streaming this coming Thursday (November 11) on AMC+.

I did not watch this show to preview it for two reasons: (1) It was not readily available on the web site where I usually find AMC and AMC+ screeners for new shows and (2) I decided not to put in an email request for the show after I read the grim description AMC posted on its media web site.

Basically, the “Ragdoll” title refers to the condition of this serial-killer’s victims after he is done with them.

“Six people have been murdered, dismembered and sewn into the shape of one grotesque body suspended from a ceiling in a block of London flats,” says this icky (to say the least) description. The unknown person who did this is nicknamed the Ragdoll Killer.

The description goes on to explain that a team of detectives has been assigned to this odious case, which -- no surprise -- proves challenging to solve. “The Ragdoll Killer taunts the police by sending them a list of his next victims, with [the name of one of the detectives] at the very end.”

The publicity material then goes on to position “Ragdoll” as “a gruesomely imaginative serial killer thriller.”

Gruesome, yes -- at least from the description provided. But imaginative? Hardly. This scenario, featuring a wily serial killer who stays a few taunting steps ahead of investigators, could have been taken from any number of run-of-the-mill episodes of “CSI” -- basically most if not all of them.

This killer’s modus operandi of sewing together his victims’ body parts and displaying them is also not that far removed from the movie and TV history of serial killers. If memory serves, the killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs” had a sewing fetish of his own.

The TV Blog concedes that a degree of imagination was likely applied to coming up with this sewn-together-body-parts, ragdoll scenario.

But that too is a characteristic of nearly every TV show and movie about serial killers that have ever been made. They have all featured new forms of serial killing that are even more bizarre than all of the previous ones.

Also common to almost all police procedurals and other TV dramas since the beginning of time is the storyline in which one of their own is targeted as a potential victim by an unknown killer -- serial killer or otherwise. This is as stale as day-old bread.

Most of all, at the risk of repeating myself (and beating the proverbial dead horse), I once again fail to see how a gruesome and grotesque TV show about a serial killer who leaves his sewn-together victims hanging around London can qualify as entertainment.

Am I the only person on earth who still brings up this subject and questions it? It often seems that way.