Trayvon Martin was a probably innocent young African American man who was shot to death by a white neighborhood watch captain in Florida, which is a stand your ground state. While this means that technically the watch captain, George Zimmerman, had the right to fire on his lawn, I believe that they were in between houses at the time. Trayvon Martin never should have been shot. I don’t know the whole story, as this was just the first episode in the series. I think it would have been more effective to tell the story as a full-length documentary, but the network has to get as much money and as many viewers as they can.

However, how I am not a fan with the way it is portrayed in the documentary, of which I just watched the first episode in the series. They were slow with the details and repeated many things many times. I felt as if it could have easily been condensed into a 30 minute segment and had the same effect. The interviews with the family were powerful. I disagree with using both audio and video clips of Donald Trump talking about making America Great Again and Colin Kaepernick kneeling in the episode. I disagree with these images because both Donald Trump and the NFL players kneeling became an issue YEARS after Trayvon Martin was shot. If the episode is focusing on an event in 2012, why show things from 2016 and 2017? I understand that this case could’ve had an effect on these events in the future, but they’re shown with almost no context, and no connections are drawn between the shooting and those events within the episode. Otherwise, I think that the story was well portrayed. I understand the repetition in order to emphasize certain details of the case, but they could’ve switched up the shots and kept the repeat audio as opposed to just rerolling the tape.

I also noticed the commercials played on the network during the break. In my opinion, many of them seemed to be targeted at African American males, which was probably the target audience for the Trayvon Martin: Rest In Power. The lead in before the Trayvon documentary was Race a movie about Jesse Owens, and the lead out was Big Momma’s House 2.I can’t really expand upon either of these movies, as I haven’t seen either one. However, I have no doubt that they were targeted at the same demographic as Trayvon Martin: Rest In Power.Viewers can tune in at 10PMET next Monday on BET to watch the second episode in the series.