(The controversy that cropped up after the release of 2017 podcast sensation S-Town was a notable exception in foregrounding questions about exploitation, consent, and journalistic responsibility.) Grifts, a particularly beloved subset of the true-crime genre, are also the subject of much pop culture fascination-the case of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos has already been the subject of a bestselling nonfiction book, a podcast, two documentaries, and an upcoming studio film. More democratic media development and distribution platforms make that easier than ever for podcasters, YouTubers, and others.īut the interest in consuming these stories isn’t matched by an interest in discussing the ethical implications of doing so. People want true crime, and creators-many of whom profess a deep and sometimes morbid interest in the topic-are happy to provide it.
In recent years we’ve seen podcasts like Serial and My Favorite Murder and streaming series like Making A Murderer, Amanda Knox, and BuzzFeed Unsolved draw huge audiences. Our current media landscape, as well as the bleak political outlook it both reflects and generates has contributed to a renaissance of the true-crime genre. After all, when times are grim, there’s something soothing about knowing someone else has it even worse. And true-crime obsession can even fill in the blanks left by “official” crime investigations: the late Michelle McNamara, whose years-long fixation on the 1970s-era California serial rapist-murderer she dubbed the Golden State Killer, helped draw renewed attention to cold cases that, in 2018, led to his capture, albeit with ethically questionable uses of DNA. Some work uses true crime for social commentary, as in the most recent season of the podcast In the Dark, which followed the case of Curtis Flowers, a Black man who has been tried six times for the same murder by a clearly racist prosecutor. True crime sensationalizes events but can also be transformatively relatable. It answers questions about why humans do what they do to each other, titillates but also validates. True crime has, in a sense, always been en mode: Many cultures have long traditions of prizing dramatized versions of real-life horrors, like the penny dreadfuls of the 19th century and the 13th-century’s Washing Away of Wrongs, possibly one of the first forensic texts. It’s giving us exactly what we want, so maybe it’s time to talk about why we want it so much. The Act, which was adapted from a wildly popular 2016 BuzzFeed feature by Michelle Dean, the show’s writer and cocreator, is simply a product of its culture. But don’t blame the show alone for its dubious existence. It feeds a combined obsession with true crime and scams for a sensationalized, tabloid, sleazy depiction of the lives of real human beings, with a strangely passive, dissociated presentation that fails to engage with what it depicts, or the issues it brings up.
Hulu’s The Act, a dramatization of the lives of Dee Dee and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a mother/daughter pair who became ensnared in an extreme case of factitious disorder imposed on another (formerly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy) until Gypsy Rose conspired with her boyfriend to kill her mother in 2015, is the latest entry in crime dramas being pumped out by streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Patricia Arquette as Dee Dee Blanchard and Joey King as Gypsy Rose Blanchard in The Act (Photo credit: Brownie Harris/Hulu)