The first season of the podcast Serial premiered on October 3, 2014. By February 2015, the season had been downloaded 68 million times. By February 2016, it had been downloaded 80 million times. True crime was popular before Serial, but the response to Sarah Koenig’s careful sifting of the story of Adnan Syed shot the genre into the pop culture stratosphere. Now, nearly ten years after the podcast aired and 22 years after Syed was convicted of the murder of Hae Min Lee, new evidence has occasioned his release from prison, and last week prosecutors officially dropped all charges against him. Serial is probably the best case scenario for a true crime phenomenon; not only was it well-researched, respectfully presented, and generally unbiased, it also had a direct and measurable impact on the case. But true crime frequently violates all or most of those tenants, so perhaps it is long past time to ask why we’re still watching it, if it can be enjoyed ethically, and how it serves the victims it portrays.
It’s ghoulish, though deeply human, that so much of our storytelling revolves around crime generally and murder specifically. We use stories to process our fears around these things, and turning them into fiction filters the pain and fear, making it feel more distant from us even as we push our faces more deeply into its dark recesses. I remember watching endless episodes of Law and Order: SVU without feeling all that impacted by the horrifying stories that show tells episode to episode. Rape, trauma, assault, crimes against children, ritualistic murder, so much of it ripped from one headline or another and then lightly fictionalized for a hungry audience that could easily see the wink and the nod. With a heroine like Olivia Benson to bring the perps to justice, or at least suffer alongside the victims, it never felt exploitative or damaging to watch so many women take so many hits. Now, I feel like what it did was numb me to its own horror so I would continue to want more of it. All crime drama is in some way inspired by the real thing; even the most creative ways to torment another human have unfortunately been thought of and executed in real life. That is of course part of the appeal; we turn to other genres to experience what we cannot find in real life. We turn to crime fiction for something else. But what about true crime? What happens to our perceptions when the stories we consume are so directly linked to the real?
Of all the directors, writers, and showrunners working to create fictionalized true crime, no one is a better case study than Ryan Murphy. He has two true crime series out on Netflix now, both currently topping the charts. Both are quite bad in their own way, one for engaging in far too much imitative verisimilitude and the other for engaging in absurd flights of fancy that undermine the severity of the actual crime. I’m talking about Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and The Watcher, both based on real crimes, though the former is by far the more famous. For both of these shows, the conversation around true crime they have sparked is far more interesting than the shows themselves. Both remind me of Lifetime movies from the late 90s, just with bigger budgets and actors who deserve more than the material they’re being given. Like my consumption of SVU, I used to watch Lifetime movies in continual succession, learning about the dangers of online prostitution, druggie boyfriends, young teens with exploitative modeling contracts, and the guy your mom just started dating who you know for sure is a serial killer. Those movies were characterized by extremely overt messaging, sloppy plotting, and a barely disguised glee for disturbing crimes. In a nutshell, that’s what Ryan Murphy shows have become.
Murphy is a household name if you’re a TV fanatic like me, but most people likely know him as the man who created Glee. Glee was a juggernaut and an unholy mess of a show, displaying all of the weaknesses I have come to associate with Murphy projects, but it was also original, occasionally brilliant, and very fun to watch. Murphy went on to make the American Horror Story (AHS) repertory series, establishing himself as a leader in horror television. He became known for working with the same actors across multiple projects, a practice he continues in Dahmer with Evan Peters. AHS is probably his most technically brilliant series, especially the two first seasons. They’re disgusting and horrifying and interesting, with sharp writing and a minimum of Murphy nonsense. All of his projects are carried by his unparalleled casting, and that became more obvious as the seasons of AHS became less good. In 2016, Murphy made his best work: American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson. It was his first true crime series and he seemed to have a deft hand for it. It was compelling, but respectful. It was nuanced and thoughtful about the crimes. It was the one and only time Murphy’s work could be described as “restrained.”
Then, Murphy got the Netflix contract. Netflix has given out a few multi-million dollar contracts to big name creators, most famously Murphy and Shonda Rhimes of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and Bridgerton fame. In 2018, Murphy was given a $300 million contract and basically carte blanche. Anything he wanted to make, Netflix would run. Everything he created before the deal was messy but interesting in some way, often compelling me to keep watching even as I recognized there was an unsteady hand at the helm. Everything post-deal is bloated, sloppy, and indulgent. With Murphy’s two latest additions, the true crime stuff has become actually offensive.
Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story has an offensively repetitive title and an offensively prurient way of shooting its central character. For all his Wisconsin accent and porny glasses, Murphy sees Peters as a sex object and shoots him that way no matter who he is playing. Seeing that gaze directed at a character who murdered and ate a series of queer men of color is revolting. The series tells much of the Dahmer story with an extreme devotion to accuracy, so much so that the first episode recreates the encounter Dahmer had with his last attempted victim almost word for word. But that obsession with recreation only make the show seem more of an exercise in unnecessary reproduction- why this story, again?- than a creative exercise. It was self-consciously marketed as a show that would center on Dahmer’s victims, and in a few episodes it achieves that goal, but Murphy’s hand is too unsteady to keep us there. Instead, he returns to Peters again and again, feeding us more sexy serial killer content. Vulture’s Sam Sanders said it best in his review of the series: serial killers are now just IP too. To do a series about Dahmer or Bundy or John Wayne Gacy is no different than doing a new Batman movie; the characters, their powers and perversions, their loves and hates are all familiar to us. And as has become increasingly clear, streaming services love endlessly iterating their well-known IP. But with Batman, you’re unlikely to run into the ethical dilemmas posed by the existence of a show like Dahmer. When the show aired, many victims’ family members were outraged at the depiction of their loved ones. One victim’s sister’s emotional response during an impact statement was recreated almost identically using courtroom footage. The real woman didn’t even know the show was being made until she saw herself on the screen.
When I turned on The Watcher, I didn’t know it was a Ryan Murphy show. Even if I hadn’t looked it up, I probably could have guessed. Just the presence of a menacingly weird Mia Farrow in batty glasses and long creepy doll braids was enough to inform me. Older actress looking for career revival? Check. Inexplicably camp physical appearance that would make anyone in the real world go… huh? Check. The Watcher is based on the 2018 New York Magazine piece by Reeves Wiedeman, also called The Watcher. The piece is about a remarkable and strange unsolved mystery. In 2014, a couple bought their dream home in Westfield, New Jersey. Before they were able to move in, they started to receive extremely weird and threatening letters that said things like, “Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too [sic] me.” As you might imagine, this gave them pause. The letters continued to arrive, the police conducted a shoddy and unsuccessful investigation, and although the family has searched for years, the letter writer has never been identified. They never moved in to the house, too frightened that the detailed descriptions of their family’s activities coupled with specific threats foregrounded actual violence. Ultimately, the family sold the house at a great loss, unable to recoup their investment due to the reputation the house acquired. Although the crime involved no actual violence, it destroyed that family’s finances, gave them post-traumatic stress, and stole a chunk of their lives. Ryan Murphy, of course, has turned out a show that takes their pain and turns it into an absurd and overwritten mess. His version is heavily fictionalized, including characters that never existed, or were never quite so cartoonish, and storylines that border on the nonsensical. Bobby Cannavale and Jennifer Coolidge carry the show, as actors so often do with Murphy projects, but they have been given a lazy script and not even the best actor can save a project from that. It would take a full rant of a review (which this is already well on its way to becoming) to tell you all the issues I have with that show, from its uneven tone and inconsistent character development to its out-of-place camp costuming, but what I’m here for is to talk true crime, so let’s focus once again on Murphy’s choice to adapt this story.
While the Dahmer project is unabashed opportunism that adds virtually nothing to our understanding of the Dahmer murders, on the surface the story behind The Watcher is well-worth adapting. The article has caused a million fan theories to surface, some helpful, most not. It has kept the mystery of 657 Boulevard alive; it is unlikely that the case would have been reinvestigated (that is ongoing) without the media attention. Undoubtedly the show will cause more people to read the original article, which will in turn direct even more attention towards the mystery. Perhaps, as with the case of Adnan Syed, the attention will bring the truth to light. In theory, there is nothing wrong with taking a real crime and using it as a jumping off point to tell a fictional story. But in this case, the real story is just so much better than the fictionalized version. The show is a campy, occasionally fun but usually stale haunted house tale, so far inferior to Murphy’s previous forays into that subgenre that its hard not to see how far down he’s come. I think I can see what Murphy was trying to do with this series: mysteries like this cause us to suspect everyone, trust nothing, and become wrapped up in our attempt to solve them. As the family’s attempts to solve this mystery continue to meet with dead ends, their conception of reality begins to dissolve and their theories become more and more insane, which in turn makes their reality appear less and less stable. A clearly bonkers story early on about the neighbors being Satanists who drink the blood of infants becomes more plausible a few episodes later when our heroes discover a tunnel in the basement leading to the accused Satanists’ house. A mysterious lipstick left in the daughters’ bathroom in episode one (a simple huh, that’s weird moment) comes back a few episodes later as belonging to a ghostly murdered teenager who likes to climb in bed with certain family members late at night. There’s something compelling about the idea of taking a true crime story and overlaying psychological fiction on top of it, something done pretty convincingly in The Staircase earlier this year, for instance. That series stayed grounded in its crime, though, and knew enough to comment on the ethics of true crime from within its own narrative. Murphy aims for this, but the execution is just so lazy that it leaves you wondering why he didn’t just tell the true story. I guess because he’s Ryan Murphy and he can’t ever “just” do anything.
At the beginning, I asked both if we can enjoy true crime ethically and how it serves the victims it portrays. In the case of a show like Dahmer, I don’t think it can be enjoyed ethically. I know that’s a killjoy response, and if you really jammed on the show I’m glad you enjoyed a piece of media and I’ll leave it at that, but the very fact that it’s a depiction of real lives and real deaths means we are making an ethical choice when we watch it. You can choose to take a pass on going that deep on a show- I do it every time I watch 50 Shades. But we vote with our eyeballs, and that’s impossible to ignore for me. In terms of The Watcher, I can’t help but think about all the online commentary accusing the family of sending the letters to themselves, and then later seeing the Netflix deal as proof they were always in it for the big payday. No matter that, according to a followup article by Wiedeman the Netflix money didn’t even cover the loss they took when they sold the house. Even if the attention the show brings to the case one day brings us all an answer to this mystery, what good will that answer do for the family now? What they needed in 2018 was the police to do their job, not a wackadoodle circus of attention from rabid Murphy fans bingeing this in a weekend in 2022 while they wait for the next AHS to drop.
There are some excellent true crime shows, books, and podcasts. I want to talk about those someday soon, too, as I don’t mean to paint this genre as unredeemable. The existence of Serial and the freedom of one innocent man weighs heavily in the balance. But in unsteady hands this genre quickly tips towards exploitation. I don’t trust Ryan Murphy with these stories, and neither should you.