Convict free after Bikel’s latest doc

Frontline knows how to shake things up in North Carolina. Last week, less than a month after the series aired Ofra Bikel’s 90-minute documentary “An Ordinary Crime,” about 21-year-old Terence Garner, a state court granted Garner’s motion for a new trial. He posted bond and went home with his mother and family for the first time in more than four years. Garner had been serving a sentence of 32-43 years for robbery and attempted murder—the “ordinary crime” he insisted all along he had no part of. Bikel—whose award-winning trilogy “Innocence Lost” led the state to drop charges in 1997 in a major child abuse case in Edenton, N.C.—again turned the spotlight on criminal justice in the state.

One last visit with Lance Loud

Twenty-nine years after their pioneering observational doc series entranced PBS viewers, the filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond are bringing back the Loud family one last time. They are talking with WETA about offering the new hour-long episode to PBS, according to Mr. Raymond and Jim Corbley, v.p. of production management at the Washington station. If a deal is struck, the film could be ready this fall, Raymond said. The occasion was the death Dec. 21 [2001] of Lance Loud, eldest son in the Santa Barbara family, who stunned his family and became a symbol of gay liberation in 1973 by coming out on national television.