How true crime entered its flop era in 2023
We’re now at a point where no stone has been left unturned by the grubby hands of true crime. The “big names” of the genre – your Dahmers and your Bundys – are the subject of wildly successful ventures on Netflix, and the streaming platform has become almost synonymous with the genre. There’s a good reason why: in just sixty days, their series Dahmer racked up a billion hours of viewing time. Elsewhere, true crime execs are scrambling for hot new murderers and cults so they can make even more of the stuff… No matter how recently the real-life events spurring them on took place. Take a film like She Said, a dramatisation of how the Harvey Weinstein scandal came to light: it was based on events that took place just a few years prior. Luckily, the genre now occupies such a prominent position in our cultural consciousness that we’re able to look at things like The Reckoning and Dahmer with a more discerning eye. What have we gleaned from that? True crime might be in its flop era.
“I certainly don’t listen to as many true crime podcasts as I did in the past” says Natalia, who described herself as a “true crime lover”. “Before, I’d listen to podcasts about missing and murdered people all the time but now I find the emotional toll really hard to manage. The constant exposure to heartbreaking narratives and graphic details of murder started to lead to a kind of desensitisation”. The waning interest in the genre felt by former true crime fanatics is echoed elsewhere. Last week, users took to X to express their disgust at an advert the Daily Mail ran for their latest podcast offering: one covering the trial of Brianna Ghey’s murderers, which promised to “follow every twist and turn from the courtroom”. One user weighed in by saying “true crime podcasters you’re all going to hell btw [sic]”.
Dahmer faced a similar fate. Though it attracted high viewing figures, it led to the families of Dahmer’s victims coming forward to express the disrespect they felt at the hands of the show’s creator, Glee’s Ryan Murphy. And for viewers and critics alike, it felt guided by nothing more than “grim fascination”. “Things that cover the really big cases – serial killers, for example – feel incredibly oversaturated”, says Charlotte, a self-proclaimed “lover of true crime”. For her, things like Dahmer beg an obvious question: “how many times can they retell these horrendous crimes?”. Essentially, there appears to be a collective fatigue with true crime. That’s something that’s illustrated no better than by the response to the BBC’s take on Jimmy Saville’s crimes, The Reckoning… Viewers simply turned the TV off.
It’s likely that what’s also driving this fatigue is the fact that a lot of true crime content ends up being more or less the same. It’s formulaic and predictable, which is evidenced in just how easy it is to parody the genre. That’s the conceit of Netflix’s fictitious true crime series American Vandal, which swaps out a salacious murder for a salacious act of vandalism. The “Loch Henry” episode of the latest series of Black Mirror does something similar: following a young couple who find themselves creating a true crime documentary while in a quiet Scottish town, the fake trailer showcased towards the end demonstrates just how easy it is to emulate the style of the genre. Send ups aren’t even limited to visual mediums either. One of the most talked about books of 2023 has been Penance, Eliza Clark’s true crime metanarrative in which the author constructs her own, fictitious true crime story in order to meditate on the trappings of the genre.
What were the first signs that true crime might have been taken too far? It’s hard to put your finger on it. When people began combining their recounting of real-life crimes with a mukbang, like YouTuber Stefanie Soo? Perhaps. Or what about creators like Bailey Sarian, who serve up their retellings of murder with a side order of *checks notes* makeup tutorials? Who could forget the “spirit box” videos? One channel which offers this kind of content recently put out a video where they purportedly talk to Shanann Watts of the highly publicised Watts family murders. There’s the segues into ads for mattresses on true crime podcasts. And what about when a true crime fan murdered a stranger “out of curiosity”? When it comes to which one of these might have been the nail in the coffin, you can really just take your pick.
This isn’t to say that it’s unanimous that true crime has turned “bad”. The sheer amount of true crime content still being produced communicates that pointing out the issues with the genre still puts you in the minority. For Charlotte, the popularity of the true crime genre is, in some ways, a good thing: “I do think the content can be very important in raising awareness of certain cases, and there have been times when podcasts and documentaries have helped to catch the perpetrator”. “The Teachers Pet podcast covered the disappearance of Lynette Dawson in 1982, and as a result the Australian police reopened the case and convicted her husband of murder last year”.
“My own view is that there’s recently been a move to make true crime less exploitative” adds Laura Thompson, the author of several true crime books. “I’m thinking for instance of the recent TV series about Peter Sutcliffe, which was very much victim-focused and the opposite of sensational”. For Thompson, true crime will never go out of fashion: “the fascination with murder is intrinsic to human nature, and I find nothing innately sinister about that. It’s just a means to examine and contain our fears about what humans are capable of doing”. There are, of course, ethical principles that need to be considered: “facts are gold, and one has to be careful not to shape a narrative according to the way one wants it to be, although that can be very tempting” says Laura.
So, what’s the solution? It would be too easy to say that all true crime needs to go. That would be taking the obvious route, and by doing so we’d be no better than a lot of true crime itself. But what does need to happen for certain is a reworking of the key tenets of the genre. Narratives that position horrific crimes as the result of the spectacular actions of one individual need to be swapped out for more of a sociological approach, where we endeavour to unpick the slew of factors that motivate these individuals and groups. At first, that will probably feel a little uncomfortable: a tad too on the sympathetic side. With time, however, it should become the new norm. One thing’s for sure, and that’s that it would be a whole lot better than the mess we’ve got on our hands right now.
