How ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ helped free an accused murderer

SOMETIMES truth is more bizarre than scripted comedy could ever be. Have you ever seen a TV show exonerating an accused murderer? It happened.

SOMETIMES truth is more bizarre than scripted comedy could ever be.

Seriously, have you ever seen something as out there as a TV show exonerating an accused murderer on any scripted program? That’s something that actually happened in real life, and Netflix’s upcoming documentary Long Shot has the details.

Back in 2003, Juan Catalan spent the day at a Los Angeles Dodgers game with his daughter. When they got back home, the police were waiting to arrest Catalan for the murder of a 16-year-old girl. Catalan knew he was innocent (I reiterate, he’d been at Dodger Stadium with his kid), but fate kept conspiring against him. Not only was he charged with murder, he was going up against a prosecutor that had never lost and regularly angled for the death penalty. The defence’s only hope was to prove that Catalan was in the stadium, preferably with a video.

Cue the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme.

It turns out, that was the day that Larry David’s HBO comedy was filming at Dodger Stadium; as David explains in the trailer, “That episode was that I picked up a hooker in the carpool lane and took her to Dodger Stadium.”

Could the defence find evidence placing Catalan at Dodger Stadium in that Curb footage? This doco follows the court case from its shocking beginning to its I-can’t-believe-this-is-real end.

Long Shot arrives on Netflix on September 29

Juan Catalan in 2004.

Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

This article was originally published on The Decider