Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Betrayal: A Father’s Secret’ on Hulu, Where A Woman Gets Blindsided By The Ugly Secret Her Husband Is Keeping

We sometimes wonder if the producers of docuseries that are based on podcasts actually know what the differences in rhythm between a podcast and docuseries are. Podcasts can tell a deeper story and ramble on a bit because, let’s face it, most people are listening to them in the car, or while working out, or while scooping poop out of the litter box (maybe that third one is specific to us, but whatever). Docuseries are being watched, and even if the person watching is on a second screen or otherwise distracted, they expect the show to get to the point faster than they expect a podcast would. A new season of a docuseries based on a popular podcast illustrates this problem very well.

BETRAYAL: A FATHER’S SECRET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man behind the wheel of his car, making a phone video, about to burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Ash,” he says. He sobs and puts his head in his hand.

The Gist: Betrayal: A Father’s Secret is a 3-part docuseries that examines what happened when Utah resident Ashley Lytton found disturbing pictures on her husband Jason Lytton’s iCloud account. The harrowing day that followed that discovery, along with Jason’s arrest and trial were documented on the hit iHeart Radio podcast Betrayal, and Ashley Lytton guides the podcast’s host, Andrea Gunning, through her discovery and what followed.

Through interviews with Ashley, her oldest daughter Avaya, her sisters and stepmother and law enforcement, along with reenactments, we hear about the scope of what Jason Lytton did. We first hear about how Ashley and Jason got together, and how he became a great father to his two stepchildren, including Avaya, before the couple had a child of their own. They got married in 2011. During a two-year period, however, Jason became withdrawn from the family and Ashley was close to leaving him. But the togetherness of the pandemic reignited his fatherly instincts.

In 2021, after being handed an electrician’s business by the retiring owner, a panicked Jason called Ashley to set up a business Venmo. Something about the panicked calls got Ashley’s radar up, and she logged into Jason’s iCloud account and found a hidden folder full of child sexual abuse material, like pictures of naked girls who were way underage.

Head swirling, the first thing Ashley did was shower off the dirty feeling she had after glimpsing at the pictures. She called her sister Anna, who advised her to go to their stepmother, who worked in the local corrections department. She also contacted Jason’s brother, who is a police officer; after Jason’s brother dismissed Ashley’s concerns, though, she had a panic attack so severe that she went to the emergency room. It was there, with her sister Anna, that she decided to report Jason to the police.

That evening, a detective called her into the station, and told her some shocking news: Not only did he have over 1000 files of child sexual abuse material, but some of the files involved someone they both knew.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This is the second season of the docuseries based on the podcast Betrayal, with the first one being Betrayal: The Perfect Husband.

Our Take: Betrayal: A Father’s Secret spends a lot of the first episode with throat-clearing setups, with Ashley Lytton talking about her childhood, her history with the father of her oldest two children, and her and Jason Lytton’s meet-cute. Where it doesn’t go into detail is how, when Jason started panicking over the Venmo account, Ashley instinctually went to his iCloud account. There seemed to be little talk about the decision-making process there, though later we do find out that Ashley had previously discovered Jason in an emotional affair with a girl that was barely 18.

It felt like a critical piece of the story was missing, taken out in an attempt to tell the story in a more pulse-pounding manner, making it as if Jason was the perfect husband and father, and Ashley’s perfect life instantly crumbled the second she saw those awful photos on his iCloud account. But something spurred her to look there in the first place, some seed of mistrust that Jason had previously planted, and without that information we’re being asked to accept how Ashley found the photos as something that naturally happens.

Not that we’re defending Jason Lytton; he’s a sexual predator whose actions went way beyond having random pictures of naked girls on his iCloud. His particular brand of pedophilia directly affected his family, including Ashley’s older daughter and son, whom he helped raise since they were 2 years old and 5 months old, respectively. He’s not just some random dude their mother married; he’s essentially their father. And what he did was such a sick betrayal (there’s that word!) that it feels a lot more time could have been dedicated to just what would motivate him to do it, as well as putting the files in the cloud to begin with.

We didn’t necessarily need an entire episode of setup about Ashley’s perfect life, and the tease at the end of the first episode about just how depraved Jason’s activities were could have easily been revealed in that first episode without a loss of the “WTF?” factor that we know the producers wanted to elicit from the viewers. In other words, Betrayal: A Father’s Secret is a good two-part docuseries that was contracted for three episodes, and it shows.

Sex and Skin: None. When Ashley tries to describe what she saw in the pictures to the producer interviewing her, she has to stop and leave the room to collect herself.

Parting Shot: After we see teases of what horrific thing Jason Lytton did, we see flashes of her family, and videos and pictures of Jason and Ashley with their kids.

Sleeper Star: Sete Aula’i, who works for Utah’s attorney general’s office, gives viewers a good definition of why what used to be called child pornography is now called child sexual abuse material.

Most Pilot-y Line: We would have liked to have heard about why Jason withdrew from his family in the years prior to the pandemic. Was it the emotional affair? Something having to do with the pictures? Something else?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite a lot of storytelling issues, Betrayal: A Father’s Secret is less than two-and-a-half hours of runtime, which should be just enough to get viewers curious enough about the Lytton case to listen to the podcast episode about it, which we’d imagine has more details.

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.