The film pioneered reenactments and demonstrated the use of true crime documentaries to point out and correct issues in the criminal justice system.

The Thin Blue Line is one of the films that helped make documentaries a viable entertainment option for arthouse moviegoers during the indie-film boom of the 1980s and '90s.

Although The Thin Blue Line assembles an almost inassailable case... it is not a conventional documentary -- not a feature-length version of one of those 60 Minutes segments in which innocent men are rescued from Death Row.

Before true crime shows were everywhere, this was one of the first murder documentaries to really hit the mainstream.