The new drama set to reinvent ‘true crime’
‘Landscapers’ delivers a muchneeded shot in the arm to a clichéridden genre, says Benji Wilson
‘HThe popularity of truecrime on TV is, in large part, down to one man
umankind cannot bear very much reality,” said TS Eliot, but then he never had Netflix. In fact, it would appear that humankind cannot get enough of the stuff, at least in terms of TV drama. Not reality in the Big Brother sense – and when was that ever any reflection of reality anyway? – but in terms of the dramatisation of real-life crimes.
Almost every real-life case, from the most infamous to ones that barely troubled the court reporters, has been turned into a TV show, all beginning with some version of the caption, “the following is based on a true story.” Des… A Confession… The Moorside… In Plain Sight… The Serpent… Honour… Manhunt (Parts 1 and 2)… Little Boy Blue… White House Farm… And that’s just in the UK. The Americans are merrily riding the same televisual train, with The Assassination of Gianni Versace, The People vs OJ Simpson, Unbelievable (about a real-life rape investigation), Dr Death (about a killer doctor) and so on.
It has got to the point where the best way for a struggling writer to get a drama commissioned would be to bump someone off in the most ghoulish fashion, string the police along for a few years and then write the dramatic adaptation themselves.
Reading down that list you’ll have noticed that this is not a problem of quality. The predominance of true crime drama has yielded some of the finest shows of the past few years, with Three Girls winning nning the 2018 Bafta Best Drama and nd A Confession and The Moorside both oth nominated. ( The People ople vs OJ Simpson won five Emmys.) mmys.) Writers love it because use it is fertile ground, full of extremes of behaviour but with th an inbuilt framework from which they can n extrapolate and ponder, brassrubbing for truth and humanity where there appears to be none.
Actors love it too, because playing an infamous psychopath, adding some deep-seated “why” to the notorious ous “what” in a shattering ng performance, is a surefire urefire way to win a gong. And
TV executives revel in it as well, because inevitably the people who were involved at the time complain that the drama is inaccurate, and a good-for-ratings debate about the meaning of truth, fiction, drama and documentary documentar ensues. ( See No Evil, ITV’s 2005 2 dramatisation of the story of o the Moors Murders, received a written complaint from Ian Brady himself questioning qu the show’s impact on the families of his victims.)
Indeed Ind documentary, or perhaps p more precisely p documentary shaped in a dramatised fashion, has both blurred the boundaries of true crime on TV and caused even more of a proliferation. The success su of Making a Murderer Mu on Netflix is both bo influential and instructive. ins The 2015 series ser (and its numerous imitators) imi has seen things thin go a step further – now no the crime, the suspects suspe and the series about both have merged into a never-ending investigation, with the viewer as both jury and detective. Who knows what it says about our collective psychology, but the grim allure of the awful thing that really happened is not going away.
How did we get here? The preponderance of true crime drama is, in large part, down to one man, Jeff Pope. He was for a long time the head of ITV Factual Drama where, unusually, he wrote as well as produced. In 1992 his first full-length TV drama, Fool’s Gold: The Story of the Brinks Mat Robbery, transformed his career, but it also changed television. Pope took a well-known crime, researched it to death and found a different way in. “I remember reading that one of the robbers tried to give his share of the gold back,” he said in 2012. “But those on the outside controlling it wouldn’t let him. That gave me my spine, to go backwards from that.”
He went on to write and produce Mrs Biggs, Lucan, Little Boy Blue (about the murder of Rhys Jones in 2007), Hatton Garden, A Confession (about the disappearance of Sian O’Callaghan in 2011) and the forthcoming Four Lives (about the gay serial killer Stephen Port). In conjunction with writer Neil McKay, Pope has produced The Moorside and Appropriate Adult (about Fred and Rose West) and together they are now working on the BBC’s The Reckoning, which examines the crimes of Jimmy Savile.
Pope started out as a cub reporter on the Ealing Gazette and uses a journalistic approach to his writing – exhaustive research that is then processed into a story with a beginning, middle and end. In the world of the 24-hour news cycle where “the story” of a crime is often decided upon and disseminated within minutes of it coming to light, Pope’s dramatisations offer a more considered perspective.
But as always in television, Pope’s brilliance and methodology have been tarnished by imitation. In recent or coming months we have The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (an ITV drama about how County Durham prison officer John Darwin faked his own death to claim life insurance), Impeachment: American Crime Story (a BBC Two drama about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky), The Yorkshire Ripper (yet another dramatisation of the hunt for Peter Sutcliffe) and, on Netflix, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.
Some will be world-shattering, some less so, but if they’re going to keep coming, I, for one, would love them to be a bit less formulaic. Earlier this year, for example, came The Pembrokeshire Murders, which served merely to highlight that there had been some murders in Pembrokeshire in the 1980s while otherwise ticking off every true crime trope.
Sky’s new drama, Landscapers, gives me hope. On the surface it’s a true crime drama, telling the story of Susan and Christopher Edwards (played by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis), the “Mansfield Murderers” who bumped off her parents, buried them in the back garden and spent all the money on Hollywood memorabilia. But in its execution – excuse the pun – Landscapers is a departure from the norm. It’s impressionistic, following flights of fancy inside the killers’ minds, casting them as cowboys in blackand-white movies as they live out their Walter Mitty fantasies.
Landscapers evokes great dramas such as Dennis Potter’s
The Singing Detective, Ted Whitehead’s 1986 adaptation of Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil or Peter Bowker’s Blackpool from 2004, where auteur figures had free rein to indulge their creativity, no matter the genre in which they chose to operate.
Landscapers doesn’t diminish the crimes the Edwardses committed, nor posit that they didn’t commit them. But it also doesn’t wallow in darkness and it dares to suggest, just gently, that Susan Edwards’s parents were pretty horrible people who maybe don’t deserve much pity. It shows that there is a place for imagination in factual drama.
That’s a reality all of its own.
Landscapers starts on Tuesday on Sky Atlantic at 9pm and is available to stream on Now TV.