@joelkeller Published March 9, 2026, 1:00 p.m. ET Where to Stream: Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese Powered by Reelgood More On: true crime Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The TikTok Killer’ On Netflix, A Spanish Docuseries About A Missing Woman, The TikToker She Traveled With, And His Dark Past Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Friend, A Murderer’ On Netflix, A Danish Docuseries About When A Member Of A Friend Group Is Found To Be The Perpetrator Of Heinous Crimes ‘Murder In Glitterball City’’ Directors Fenton Bailey And Randy Barbato Address The Doc’s Chilling Ending: “Both Should Be In Prison” Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Girl On The Run: The Hunt For America’s Most Wanted Woman’ On Hulu, About The Manhunt For Sarah Pender After Her 2008 Escape From Prison Friends Like These: The Murder Of Skylar Neese is a three-part docuseries now streaming on Hulu that examines the 2012 disappearance of the 16-year-old Neese and how law enforcement’s investigation led them to arrest Neese’s best friends, Shelia Eddy and Rachel Shoaf, were arrested and convicted of her murder.
Opening Shot: A school hallway, with Twitter messages to an “@skylar” superimposed on the walls and lockers.
The Gist: Via interviews with friends of Neese’s, plus her parents, and law enforcement (including an FBI agent named Morgan Spurlock), as well as social media posts and news footage, the first episode of Friends Like These discusses Neese’s disappearance in July, 2012. At first, police detectives in Star City and Morgantown, WV, where Neese lived, suspected that she ran away. But her parents insisted that, when she didn’t show up at her part-time job, that behavior was very unlike her.
The first episode also examines the longtime friendship between Neese, Eddy and Shoaf. They were a very close-knit trio, basically their own high school clique. While they were all outgoing and showed an adventurous side while together, Neese felt like she was always the most straight-laced of the group, and at some point during their junior year, it became apparent that Eddy and Shoaf were leaving her out of things. It took a number of months after Neese’s disappearance for the grainy footage of a car picking Neese up the night she disappeared was linked to Eddy.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While not produced by ABC News, Friends Like These has the feel of a lot of the ABC News Studios docuseries we see on Hulu, like Girl On The Run: The Hunt For America’s Most Wanted Woman.
Our Take: The story of Skylar Neese’s disappearance and murder is an interesting one, though the title of Friends Like These: The Murder Of Skylar Neese comes pretty close to giving away who killed her (so does looking the case up online, of course). By setting up Neese’s friendship with Eddy and Shoaf in the first episode, though, director Clair Titley gives the viewer a chance to really wonder just how such a close-knit group got to the point where two members of the group would kill the third member, simply because they don’t like her anymore.
Tiltey gets a little cute with the storytelling at times, having tweets “scribbled” onto walls and “posted” on electronic signs to indicate how pervasive Skylar’s story became in the small town of Star City and the larger Morgantown metro area. She also has actors voice what we think are journal entries for all three girls, and the style they use sounds like they’re narrating episodes of Gossip Girl instead of a true crime docuseries. The graphics also scream “teen romcom.”
Of course, all of this is a choice, because Tiltey wants to set up the friendship before lowering the boom about the murder. At the very least, by the end of the episode, local and federal law enforcement is finding out the inconsistencies in Eddy and Shoaf’s story that point to the idea that they had something to do with Neese’s disappearance.
Performance Worth Watching: Neese’s parents, Dave and Mary, are the standouts here, mainly because they tell the story of the five months before Neese’s body was found in a very matter-of-fact manner.
Parting Shot: “They’re in way too deep, and they don’t know a way out,” says Spurlock, the FBI agent, about Eddy and Shoaf.
Sleeper Star: The classmates that Tiltey talks too blend together a bit, but they all paint a picture of just how close the three friends were, and how it all started to unravel.
Most Pilot-y Line: The voice actors voicing all three girls just sound clunky to us, and we’re not even sure if the words they’re reciting are actually written by the girls or not.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Although the stylistic touches of Friends Like These: The Murder Of Skylar Neese are a bit too cutesy for our taste, it still tells a fascinating story of how two friends turned on a third in the most violent way possible.
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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
