How the last ten years have (re)defined true crime

Ten years ago, the first season of the hit podcast Serial came out. Since then, fans have been riding a massive wave of true crime entertainment — for better and for worse.

The latest season of the podcast, about Guantanamo Bay, comes at a time when the genre is more saturated than ever. There's the documentary What Jennifer Did on Netflix, a new season of The Jinx from HBO, and Connie Walker's Pulitzer-winning podcast Stolen, to name just a few.

Still, questions remain around how true crime can exploit the victims involved, how law enforcement is depicted — and how white journalists portray communities they aren't part of.

Today on Commotion, crime writers Sarah Weinman and Karen K. Ho join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about how the genre has grown over the last decade, and where it still falls short.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Sarah, I'm going to start with you on this one with a big question: is there a way to approach true crime that doesn't feel exploitative?

Sarah: There absolutely is a way to approach it in a way that's not exploitative. I think since the first season of Serial really took off, there has been example after example of shows, and podcasts, and documentaries and books that center victims — that focus on the fact that people's real lives have been ruptured and will be ruptured forever by these incredible acts of violence and worse.

I think what Connie Walker does first with Missing & Murdered, and later with Stolen, all of those seasons are amazing. She's an Indigenous woman. She's talking about Indigenous communities. She really gets in there, and people trust her. As a result, she's able to report with considerable empathy and compassion. That's what we need more of.

Elamin: When I think about true crime as a genre, I have this natural sort of "ick" reaction at first. I feel uncomfortable about this because, as you said, real lives have been destroyed over a true crime that is at the center of these cases. Sarah, can you give a brief history of why true crime has kind of been tagged with this idea of exploitation?

Sarah: True crime has been having a moment for something like 300-some odd years. As a society, whether we're in Canada, the United States or globally, crime is a way for people to reckon with their deepest fears, and people like to rubberneck. So as a result, of course true crime is going to wade into really icky, exploitative territory.

But I think the trick is to push back against that and go, there are ways to portray these stories so that the actual lived lives, the actual communities that people are part of, the bigger systemic issues can be explored. We focus so much on extraordinary cases, but it's really the depressingly mundane stories of intimate partner violence, socio economic instability — these are the things that we need to focus more attention on. But it's so much easier to glamourize a missing or murdered beautiful white woman, because that's somehow easier to manage.

Elamin: Karen, you wrote the definitive piece on Jennifer Pan for Toronto Life in 2015. She was convicted for first degree murder in her mother's death and attempted murder of her father. This was your first major investigative article. When you look back on that piece now, how do you look back on your approach to that story and the aftermath of that article?

Karen: I think my ignorance helped a lot. I was really ignorant about the tradition and history of true crime and as a result, I ignored a lot of the tropes and the often heavy reliance on the perspective of police enforcement. And so, my story does not focus on police enforcement almost at all. And then on top of that, I used a very specific example of Jay Caspian Kang's reporting on the Oikos University shooting … Jay highlights the humanity of the community that was hurt as well as the person at the center of the crime. That was my guide map for how I did my story.

WATCH | Official trailer for What Jennifer Did:

Elamin: Now, we should say Netflix has put out their documentary on Jennifer Pan's conviction. It's been so incredibly popular on the streamer. But even though you're deeply familiar with this story, you've decided that watching this documentary is not for you. Why is that?

Karen: I don't own a television.

Elamin: Okay, that's a good first reason.

Karen: The other thing is, in general I don't [consume] true crime, with the rare exception of Sarah's books. But the thing about it is, I didn't want to encourage watching it. I had read enough articles about What Jennifer Did to inform the fact that I probably wouldn't enjoy it, or I would be very frustrated with how it was done. I was already seeing articles about the documentary that included errors about myself and my reporting.

Elamin: Netflix is facing a bunch of accusations that they used AI to recreate some photos of Jennifer. Sarah, why is that causing so much outrage?

Sarah: In part because we expect that if we're watching a documentary or listening to a podcast about a true story, that everything in it is true. And what AI does is muddy the waters. If we're blurring the lines between fact and fiction — and that's something that true crime has had a big problem with throughout its entire checkered history — do we really need AI to add to this mess and muddy the waters even more?

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.