I think true crime is basically just bad and morally corrosive most of the time, and I appreciate that people tried to do "oh it's about women trying to process living in a violent sexist world" but I actually think that's only a small part of it, true crime is mostly just dehumanising and grim
The Criminal podcast is the only one I think that gets it right, where the stories have a human core but also take into account the way our justice system impacts individuals
There's people on FB trying to True Crime Shit Sherlock the horrible accidental death of a guy I knew and yeah it's just fucking evil, they're full throatedly libelling a recent widow
That's horrible, and it's only a matter of time before one of these things ends a criminal trial - amazed an on the ball lawyer hasn't managed it already.
I've been waiting for this to happen with a crime that happened to someone close to me, have already seen terfy accounts using it for their agenda which is fucking grim
Gross
It included one of them hashtagging the victim's name, which pissed me off because they were entirely known by their middle name and if you fucking knew anyone involved Sandra you'd actually have realised that
Is this a Cheshire murder enquiry?
I don't know what that is.
Ah ok. Because there’s a Cheshire murder enquiry and the blue ticks have found it. The suspect is trans and for some reason the angry people and terfs have only honed in on my colleague for abuse.
Oh, Ok - I don't follow things as faithfully as the true crime fellas! No, this was something different. But ffs people are grim, aren't they?
We had a family tragedy where the bad guy was called Moriarty and the good cop dealing with it was called John Watson. Was terrified that the media would be all over it. But a scary police PR woman shut down all inquiries and allowed us our privacy and dignity.
Jesus I'm sorry!
They're just bored! They're further traumatising a family who suffered a horrible loss! Because they're bored! Watch Netflix or something Julie!!
Netflix? I fear it's just True Crime all the way down.
They do have a great spoof of the True Crime style called American Vandal.
That’s really disgusting.
It really is.
it always feels s bit like the whole obsession with the Nazis - books, TV etc will always talk sombrely about "darkness" and "evil" and stress how important it is to understand - while also revelling in every detail. The difference being that while WW2 is passing out of living memory, True Crime
could have happened last month. Investigations still underway, people still grieving while podcasters gush about their New Favourite Murder like it's the latest Death in Paradise. It's just Newgate Novels, 200 years on. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgate...
Very much where I stand on it. Have never once found it interesting or fascinating to venerate the men who commit horrible atrocities against their fellow men. Leads you to dark places.
I’m a journaliste (retired) and long long ago decided to stop watching kidnap/torture/rape films and the like. I don’t need it, like ever
Loathsome “entertainment” - people come up with convoluted self-justification for watching, but most of it is only possible because someone’s last moments were spent in terror and pain, and their families and friends were left with their loss.
The closest thing to this that I've ever enjoyed is those youtube videos where a judge denies probable cause to a sloppy prosecutor or whatever. Still feels kind of grim and base but at least the cops are the butt of the joke
Agreed, and I think it contributes to shifting of real life into a 'spectacle' that is viewed & consumed. This bears more resemblance to crime fiction, so it treated as such. I suspect this is similar to the way some ppl behave online towards others, that the see as unreal.
It seems to me part of a larger tendency to try to turn minor vices (in this case morbid curiosity) into a virtue. It’s fine to indulge in these things, but it becomes a problem when you convince yourself it’s good for you.
True crime is also a very old genre and probably isn't going away. It changes forms, but broadsides and murder ballads and tabloids go back centuries. It's not therapy and it's not going to be the Imminent Death of the Republic. It's just a very old form of cheap thrills.
Right, but who wants to see oodles of sensationalist thumbnails of murdered women when all one wants to do is log into the streaming platform they got to watch the snooker?
Also we didn't have the same level of mass-media conspiracy theorists/human flesh search engine antics from people who in times past would have been considered the village fool rather than being afforded the platform to broadcast every brainfart to their fellow "freedom thinkers"
Arguably the antics were worse since the most sensationalist crimes were also often printed with the address they occurred at, meaning random strangers would also come to crime victims' homes. There's stories of people stealing and selling mementos from the crime scenes. Still happens, but less
This is true, certainly.
The circus around the Nicola Bulley case was so incredibly grim, complete crank magnetism in action
At our regional anti-hate crimes taskforce, I found out that apparently there is a true crime to white supremacist pipeline.
I love fiction books that use the trappings of true crime as a storytelling device, but hate actual true crime - it's pretty much always exploitative and distasteful
Wrote a whole article along those lines not too long ago inews.co.uk/culture/radi...
True Crime is good when it has a goal, like calling into question a criminal case where someone was likely convicted when there was reasonable doubt. The problem is that there is a content economy around it now that focuses on the morbidity and is teaching people this is "good entertainment"
I see people doing it on here because they want to engagement farm and slander people for whatever petty reasons. It literally happened last night
For the most part I absolutely agree, but I will say I’ve watched some very sensitive, affecting documentaries recently around particular VAWG murders in the UK. Sky Docs channel and C4 tend to get it right more than the others - less sensationalism and more authenticity, and sadness, really.
This is a beautiful and heartfelt essay by my daughter about how she was terrified/enraged that her cousins murder might end up as a murder show episode: Don’t Use My Family For Your True Crime Stories ‹ CrimeReads share.google/zGRmRW3hdlDx...
Oh my word. I am so sorry. One of the reasons I'll never listen to true crime.
In case anyone would like to read about how it feels when someone you love is brutally murdered and your worst fear is that someone will make crime tv episode about it.
oh gosh, I'm sorry this happened to your family
It was violence to the soul. Crushing. My only child was 355 days older than my sister's only child, Sabina who was brutally murdered in Philly 3wks before her 21st birthday. Horrendous crime. Insurmountable grief. But my daughters writing about it is beautiful. They were basically sisters.
Oops my dyslexia strikes again! Messed up my alt text. The girl with the long dark hair is on the left *my right, she's my niece, Sabina.
Her writing is beautiful. I’m sorry for your family’s terrible loss.
Thank you and yes. She sure can write! ❤️
This is so very well written Heidi, thank you for posting it.
That's my daughter's writing and that's what she does with her whole life! I know, she has a way with words, for sure!
reconciling "it helps women process living in a scary violent world" with "people think a shopping bag in their car door means they're being kidnapped right now" makes me think a lot of the anxieties the genre speaks to are bullshit, same as they were in the 90s.
Exactly. A nice bit of fictional nordic noir is relaxing, unlike real nasty crime. Just wish Channel 4 would stop suggesting I'd like some horrible true crime just because I watched Astrid et Raphaelle.
Humans love violence.
My spouse has a forensic biology degree so this is exactly her kind of field. I don't particularly care for it and I do something else when she had a serial killer investigation on. It is an actual thing that forensic science is now overwhelmingly women-coded.
Thank you for voicing this
True crime is essentially a pure negative for society. On one end, terminally online true crime obsessed teens (with an equal gender split) have formed black pilled communities that produce mass shooters at an extremely high rate. On the other you have normie moms freaking out about “rampant crime”
Just like the Cops TV show, it encourages fear and otherization while valorizing police who more often than not perpetrate, cover up, or fail to adequately investigate violent crimes in real life
And even when true crime shows do show the cops failing to solve the murder or catch the bad guy, the narrative implication is almost never that policing doesn't actually work, but that the police need to be given even more power and fewer restrictions if they're supposed to do their job right.
"If only the police had just raided that suspect's house without a warrant, or tortured the guy who we now know in hindsight was guilty into confessing, or kept that clearly suspicious person in custody instead of letting them go because some reporter accused them of 'violating their rights', or..."
You are what you eat applies to your thoughts too, very most of the time.
I get being fascinated by criminal procedure and base human motivations but that’s what fictional crime and mystery shows are for. No need to sensationalize real people’s lives to explore those themes
It feeds into the copaganda that the world is a dangerous place where only the thin blue line of the police is what is keeping for tearing each other apart. You know, bullshit.
I have no great thoughts on the morality, but I lost interest once I had kids. I can’t do stories about hurt/murdered children. I’m uncomfortable or (more often) bored by the genre otherwise. Mysterious disappearances are still aight, but just a story of someone being killed? I don’t get it anymore.
was at my best friends wedding and some guests could not stop ranting about true crime podcasts they listened to and I was more repulsed and angrier than I've been since idk how long it was so out of place and toxic I wanted to explode
I think there are some in the sphere of discourse who don't understand that coping mechanisms are generally extremely negative for mental wellbeing in the long-term because they don't address the core problems causing the anxiety in the first place.
There’s a true crime podcast on the iHeart Radio network — I’ve forgotten the name — which has a ‘fun’ USP of introducing cocktails and mocktails based on the crime of the week. Just one of the most WTF ideas anyone has come up with.
I remember an ad in the cinema that was promoting 'our channel has reality TV' and it then pivoted to 'and also we have true crime', presenting it as just like glam reality TV but Darker. And it felt really, really grimy to see it presented like that so openly.
This is why my favorite "true crime" case is the theft from the Isabella Gardner museum, you get the mystery and the twists and turns but it's just stolen art
Did Thomas Crown do it?
there is an Italian true crime YouTuber who is mostly respectful and tries to center her work around the victims rather than the gory details and the perpetrators, and even she cannot help but title her books "REAL CRIME STORIES THAT WILL KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT"