The result is a genre that’s still indebted to decades-old conventions, but also one that has found renewed relevance and won a new generation of fans by going beyond the usual grisly sensationalism. And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions. The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedurals dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J.
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Social media helped turn The Jinx and Serial into participatory experiences, while also contributing to their widespread exposure. New forces-improved technology, new media, and less trust in institutions-have helped shape true crime into a truly modern form.
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Simpson trial when it debuts in 2016.Īlthough true crime has found new ways to appeal to mainstream audiences in the 21st century, in many ways, the genre hasn’t changed much since the days of Poe or Capote, as evidenced by the surface similarities between Marie Roget and Serial. And American Crime Story, an upcoming FX series, will tackle the O.J. The Weinstein Company recently bought the rights to turn In Cold Blood into a miniseries. On television, HBO aired the six-part docuseries The Jinx earlier this year, focusing on the suspected murderer Robert Durst. In film, Bennett Miller’s Oscar-nominated Foxcatcher explored the life of the philanthropist and murderer John du Pont. That series spawned the legal-analysis podcast Undisclosed, focusing on the same case, which debuted in mid-April as iTunes’s most-downloaded podcast and has since settled into the #14 spot.
First came Serial, the 2014 This American Life spinoff, which revisited the investigation of the 1999 killing of the Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee, and the conviction of her boyfriend, Adnan Syed. Recently, though, true crime has taken on new visibility. Since that time, true crime has mostly been dismissed as tabloid fodder, with a few exceptions-most notably, Truman Capote’s 1966 In Cold Blood, which showed that the genre could be a real literary form. America Needs a Rom-Com Bailout Kevin Townsend, Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Hannah Giorgis