Is true crime bad?

Many years ago, I used to listen to a true crime podcast called Sword and Scale. I gather from internet comments that the show and its host went off the rails some time ago, but at least when it started it was well produced and covered interesting stories. But eventually, it just got too lurid and unpleasant, and I stopped listening.

Jump ahead to a few years ago, when I’m talking to a woman at a party and find out we are both fans of To Catch a Predator from Chris Hansen and Dateline. I asked her what she thought about the ethics of the true crime genre broadly. She had never considered the question.

The ethics of the genre have been on my mind lately. To Catch a Predator consistently blurred the line between investigative journalism and reality TV. Robert Pattinson is set to star as Chris Hansen in a film, Primetime, releasing at the end of the month. The story is loosely based on the case that got the original series cancelled, the suicide of assistant district attorney Bill Conradt in what became the show’s final investigation in Murphy, Texas.

That all happened in 2006, two decades ago, but To Catch a Predator still looms large in the collective imagination. Chris Hansen has started no fewer than three follow-up shows, and countless YouTubers and streamers have attempted to imitate it, though rarely with any degree of the professionalism that Hansen brought to the investigations.

Yet, I still described myself as a fan at the beginning of this post. Because it’s fantastic, compelling television, right? The confrontation, the humiliation, the arrest, it was all absolute cinema. And at least with Predator, the viewer can always tell themselves the person caught up in the web deserved it, he was a predator, he wanted to hurt kids. And the viewer is secure in the knowledge that there were no kids, not this time, no innocents got hurt. Of course, a lot has come out in the months and years since the original show was cancelled that muddies this uncomplicated picture of justice, which is why I’m looking forward so much to Primetime.

A lot of true crime isn’t even this ambiguous, though. Let’s go back to the basic formula of the true crime podcast that Sword and Scale helped to define: a gruesome crime, a wicked perpetrator, archival audio of the 911 calls, tearful pleas from family members, the police interrogation ending in a confession. The victim recedes into the background. The entertainment comes from the immersion in suffering.

Like I said, I grew uncomfortable with the genre years ago and don’t engage with it much anymore. Seeing My Favorite Murder (“a weekly true crime comedy podcast”) made me feel vaguely ill. But there are exceptions. In mid-2015, I read a story on Reddit about a woman, Stephanie Dietrich, who spent countless hours searching the woods outside Akron, Ohio with her dog Ricco to locate the gravesite of two missing children. I thought Criminal, an uncommonly humane take on the true crime genre, would be interested in the story. They published “Finding Sarah and Philip” nineteen months later. There is good in this world.

True crime is not inherently lowbrow. In Cold Blood is a gripping, beautifully written book that Truman Capote famously described as a “nonfiction novel”, recounting the 1959 murder of the Clutter family. It is a work of serious literary merit, and yet again the two murderers are afforded much greater psychological depth than the victims in the story. Capote played fast and loose with the facts of the case to paint a richer picture of his two main characters.

I suppose this argument need not be limited to making art out of true crime. What about books about wars that give all their attention to the strategy and tactics and yet do not name a single civilian who died of starvation, disease, or brutality? Medical mysteries? Disaster stories? Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger is arresting in large part because engineers saw the danger coming, warned about it, and were ignored before seven people died on live TV.

So yes, true crime does not have a monopoly on turning suffering into entertainment. We have always made stories out of terrible things. Sometimes these terrible things—war, famine, pestilence, or murder—are interesting because of what they reveal about a time and place, about how societies work, about ourselves. One thing true crime reveals is that part of us simply enjoys awful things for their awfulness. The awfulness is the point. There is a market for reveling in it.

I don’t really know where to draw the line, and I don’t begrudge anyone else for drawing it differently. But I have a hard time accepting the feeling that someone is trying to sell me another human being’s worst day as ephemeral content.