True crime wasn’t invented in the 2010s. The genre—and, by extension, audiences’ appetite for reading about gruesome crimes in lurid detail—has existed for almost as long as the printing press. In her 2019 piece titled “True Crime and the Trash Balance,” Soraya Roberts wrote about the shifting perception of the genre in mainstream pop culture. In the 16th and 17th centuries, crime reports with an explicit Christian tilt were written to connect the dots between sin and punishment for household crimes: child or servant abuse, spousal murder, etcetera. By the 1800s, true crime “penny dreadfuls” detailing the exploits of murderers run amok became a source of easily digestible amusement that picked up a reputation as “insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims,” as Roberts put it.
In the mid-1900s, though, a facelift from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, hailed as the first-ever work of literary non-fiction, finally made the genre viable terrain for high-minded writers and filmmakers—who produced other standouts like Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line, which generated publicity that led to its subject Randall Dale Adams’ release from a Texas state prison. (Later, Adams would successfully sue Morris over the rights to his life’s story.)
That highbrow style only lasted so long. From the late 80s onward, true crime once again slipped into the realm of “low culture,” thanks to the advent of daytime television. Talk shows pumped out obsessive, tabloid coverage of big-ticket crimes, like the O.J. Simpson trial, the BTK Killer’s unmasking, and the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. The explosion of made-for-TV movies sensationalized crimes like teen Amy Fisher’s shooting of her statutory rapist’s wife or the Menendez brothers murdering their allegedly abusive parents. The introduction of COPS and America’s Most Wanted stoked white America’s fears about Black crime and fed the desire to see “criminals” get punished. Once again, true crime was trash.
the genre’s advocacy tilt spawned yet another offshoot that harkens back to the fearmongering of the 80s and 90s. Practiced by popular podcasts like Crime Junkie and My Favorite Murder, wherein the act of creating crime-centric content became morally righteous on its own merit. Accurately portraying violent crimes becomes an act of memorializing victims, as does warning potential new victims—aka, listeners and viewers—about life’s myriad dangers. Writer Emma Berquist called out this “true crime brain rot” mentality in an essay for Gawker, pointing to the sex trafficking panic and last year’s TikTok frenzy around Gabby Petito’s murder as natural consequences. True crime as victims’ rights work and precautionary tale rolled into one makes the world seem much more dangerous than it actually is, just like COPS, and tabloids, and Fox News do. Fear is the point.
As long as production companies labor under the delusion that there’s real social utility to a mass-market retelling of sensationalized crimes, done the “right way,” we’ll continue to get these stories that are, at best, offensive and, at worst, encourage distrust and stoke fears about the monolith of “crime.” It’s time for a return to form: True crime with a solid base of research that still scratches an itch—something like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, where late author Michelle McNamara’s all-consuming search for the Golden State Killer adds another lurid layer to an already horrifying true story. Solid gold entertainment. Making the genre bear a greater burden than that doesn’t do anyone any favors.
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