crime on demand
We all love a good intrigue, but since when did scandal, murder and bone-chilling evil count as casual pastimes? Sinead Stubbins investigates what’s behind our growing fascination with true crime
Serial, Making A Murderer, The Jinx – how true crime became a true addiction.
Last Christmas I became consumed with the murder of Teresa Halbach. I wanted to talk about it constantly; while seasoning a giant turkey on Christmas Eve, wrapping presents and even the next day when my family were gathered around the dinner table looking incredulous that I wanted to discuss such a macabre topic while wearing a paper hat and shovelling trifle into my mouth.
I understood their reaction – I was even creeping myself out. But I wasn’t alone in my compulsion to share the most gripping details of Making
A Murderer. By mid-january, the 10-part Netflix docu-series following prime suspect Steven Avery was so ubiquitous, it had inspired a Simpsons parody and Tumblrs dedicated to the normcore fashion of one of Avery’s lawyers. Celebrities were hooked, too, with Kim Kardashian tweeting she had joined the streaming service just so she could see what all the fuss was about (Gigi Hadid tweeted back, “On standby for emotional support”).
The thing about Making A Murderer, or any of the numerous true-crime shows released since, is that these stories inspire a specific type of obsessiveness, the kind that makes you beg everyone around you to also tune in, so you have an excuse to religiously discuss every episode (no-one wants to be left out of the conversation on Facebook). Their addictiveness is
“The level of intense immersion makes the viewer feel like they have a unique handle on the story. Talking about these shows and podcasts is just as captivating as consuming them”
aided by the fact that it’s easier to consume pop culture now than ever before, particularly due to “bingewatching” models of streaming and greater access to downloadable TV and podcasts online – and there always seems to be a new, highquality program to add to the queue. True crime has become the dominant water-cooler conversation of 2016.
“There’s been a rebirth of the category as a spectacle genre,” says Sarah Bunting, editor-in-chief of true-crime blog The Blotter. “In a bookstore, the true-crime section is usually in the back, in the ‘embarrassing’ section. It was something that you were a little ashamed of, like your guilty pleasure.”
But repackaged as glossy, prestige television or a gritty podcast, the stigma around “low-brow” true crime is beginning to evaporate. Last year, HBO’S documentary series The Jinx: The Life And Deaths Of Robert Durst
inspired massive interest in the real-estate heir who’s been linked to three deaths. The finale attracted more than one million viewers in the US, not taking into consideration the millions of illegal torrents that were being simultaneously downloaded around the world. More recently, Ryan Murphy’s much-anticipated
The People V OJ Simpson attracted international acclaim and introduced a new generation to the salacious story of that mid-’90s murder trial. Closer to home, The Australian’s five-episode Bowraville podcast has been a major talking point. Hosted by crime reporter Dan Box, it traces the investigation into the murders of three Aboriginal children from the same street, in the same NSW rural town within five months of each other in the early ’90s, and their families’ desperation to have the cases treated as serial killings.
There’s no question true-crime programs are dominating the cultural conversation. While interest in the genre is not new – Truman Capote’s 1966 book In Cold Blood is still referenced as pioneering a more sophisticated take on the subject area – it does seem to have reached a new intensity. According to Bunting, this recent popularity can be traced back to the cultural phenomenon of Serial’s first season in late 2014. The podcast, which investigated the real-life 1999 murder of teenager Hae Min Lee, and the contested guilt of her convicted killer Adnan Syed, attracted a diverse global audience when previously true crime had appealed to a much more niche demographic.
While speaking at the Australian International Documentary Conference held in Melbourne this year, two of the creators of The Jinx, Marc Smerling and Zac Stuartpontier, said the only thing that has changed is that true-crime stories are now being told in a more gripping way. “We were always watching crime – Law & Order has always been pervasive,” Smerling said. “But it used to be like one hour, one crime, now it’s like 10 episodes. It’s become more of a soap opera. Now you have people interested in the people in the story because you’re cultivating that in the story.”
The communal experience of watching these shows offered by social media has allowed a level of intense immersion that makes the viewer feel like they have a unique handle on the story. Talking about these shows and podcasts is just as captivating as consuming them. Particularly on Reddit, amateur detectives have spent hours debating the merits of evidence presented in the Avery case, conjuring elaborate theories based on their own research and even crowdsourcing court transcripts and hours of police confession videos.
“There is this tension to it,” says Bunting. “You think you want it resolved but you kind of don’t because the thing that makes you obsessed with it is that you’ll never know for sure.” For this reason, the obsession with
Serial still hasn’t faltered. Even though it’s recently finished its second season, such was the fascination with Adnan Syed that host Sarah Koenig peppered the new season with special episodes about Syed’s attempt to be granted a retrial. The addictive nature of the mystery is what inspired The Serial
Serial, which is essentially a podcast about what pop-culture writers thought of the Serial podcast they had just listened to. “We figured if we all spent a bunch of time talking about it, other people might want to do that, too. It was kind of a lark, and then it did really, really well,” says Marah Eakin, one of the podcast’s hosts.
Deciphering the story can be exciting, but at what point does this endless hypothesising with friends and assembling evidence like puzzle pieces become insensitive? “Sometimes I talk about true-crime stuff like it’s