This Is a Robbery: Netflix Casually Investigates a Mysterious High-Profile Art Heist

Oftentimes true crime series have such heavy, soul-crushing topics. Though fascinating, they can be difficult to watch all in one sitting. A select few true crime series can have both an enticing storyline and not be incredibly sad or traumatizing; thankfully, Netflix’s new This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist fits the bill. Similar to Sandi Tan’s documentary Shirkers about missing strips of film, or perhaps even the recent McMillions on HBO, This Is a Robbery is a lost and (sort of) found caper that’s actually quite fun to watch. Instead of the McDonald’s Monopoly game prize or a student film, the missing items here are paintings. Huge museum paintings, to be exact.

This Is a Robbery explores the mystery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a gorgeous spot that’s well-known to most Boston locals but fairly off-the-map for those new to the city. The brick building is like a Venetian palace; other than clusters of windows, the exterior is rather plain and uninviting—but the inside? Breathtaking. A lush forest erupts through the center of the museum, which has back corridors filled corner-to-corner with picturesque canvases and sculptures. The first episode rattles off a bevy of details about Isabella Stewart Gardner and her lovely museum, but we’ll cut that exposition down to the nitty-gritty. When the traveling socialite established her museum, curating art and designing the perfect collection, she left one rule in her will: if any permanent, major changes were made, everything was to be shipped off to Paris and auctioned off to other collectors. It had to stay the same, forever, or else it couldn’t stay at all.

And then, 75 years after her death, the unthinkable happened. Around a dozen key paintings were stolen from the museum in one fell swoop. Ripped from their frames and dashed off to an unknown location, to this day, the masterpieces (including stunning works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, and more) have yet to find their way back to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As such, Colin Barnicle’s four-part Netflix series works to solve the case.

Right away, the first episode does exactly what it’s meant to do: pique your interest. A museum robbery sounds like something straight out of a James Bond film, and This Is a Robbery treats the topic as such. The music growls as talking heads recreate the night of the crime from memory; the dramatization throws us into the museum to witness the paintings being torn from the walls. Sure, the thieves’ steps look pretty traceable—except for in one room, in which no one entered during the theft, even though a painting was found missing. So many theories are to be made. Was the security guard in on the job? Maybe the ghost of Isabella Stewart Gardner herself? Or perhaps a Boston mob was involved? The mystery of the museum is enough to hook one’s interest, and the first episode of the mystery starts strong.

Unfortunately, despite intriguing tangents and a thumping score, the rest of This Is a Robbery dwindles after the big bang of the theft. As the second episode begins to unfurl potential motives, it becomes quite clear why this isn’t a longer series. There’s not a huge story to unpack. The mystery grows a bit stale, and the filmmaking—a standard mix of interviews, archival footage, animated maps, and hazy reenactments—isn’t intriguing enough to add any buoyancy. Still, if nothing else, you’ll certainly want to take a visit to Boston and check out the gallery where the empty frames haunt the walls as reminders of what used to be hanging.