Overkill?
Is the True Crime bubble about to burst? One industry insider is spooked: “We’re beginning to see a troubling lack of high quality gruesome content"
We’ve witnessed a huge spike in the amount of True Crime content over the last few years. And while this has meant huge profits for some of the most popular True Crime creators, some people in the industry see dark clouds on the horizon.
I talked to a True Crime insider- a producer for one of the America’s top True Crime podcasts about what he sees as an industry in peril.
“We’re beginning to see a dangerous shortage of quality True Crime content. There’s just not enough supply to the meet the insatiable demand we’ve created for stories of maniacs committing lurid, gruesome crimes, unfortunately.”
“We’ve picked all the low hangin fruit-your Bundies, your Dahmers, your Mansons-the celebrity killers, if you will. But as the audience grows, so too does the demand for the type of high quality, grisly content they’ve come to expect from our podcast.
“But at some point the content inevitably begins to thin out. The murders become a little less unfathomably evil and a little closer towards the banal end of the spectrum. The dirty little secret is that most murders just aren’t that exciting. They usually just amount to a bunch of dumb people getting drunk and shooting each other. I mean we can dress anything up with mood music but there’s only so much you can do to make that interesting.
“I worry that we may be looking at a True Crime bubble. And just like with the housing bubble, when we thought housing prices would magically go up forever, so we also thought that the supply of riveting, barbaric murders is something we could always count on. I mean we’re talking about human nature right? We’ve always killed and dismembered one another, back to when we were cavemen flaying each other with crude stone tools. It’s in our DNA.
“But now I just think there’s a lot less creativity, a certain lack of panache with today’s murderers. It’s all mass shootings these days. I mean, sure, the body count is high but, it’s over so quick. How are we supposed to serialize something like that? We’re trying to draw in an audience, and for that you need some suspense, a narrative arc. Ideally you want the murders to be spread out over a period of time, better to draw out the story and really get the audience engaged.
“I mean, as much insanity, mayhem and death that we’ve seen recently, a lot of it is, frankly, kind of boring. Just look at the drop-off in the number of serial killers over the last couple decades. I don’t know what explains it. Maybe it’s the effect of technology- people killing time on Tik-Tok when they could be killing co-eds. Or maybe, with privacy being dead, it’s just a lot harder for a serial killer to remain anonymous long enough to rack up bodies. Most serial killers are drifters-they go from town to town, usually under assumed identities, murder, and move on. Now there’s no way for them to freely move around the country and murder without someone instantly being able to find out their names on Facebook. And just think about all the great content that’s been deprived to us by some idiot bragging about his murder on social media, only to get caught, when he easily had some more in him if he hadn’t been so thirsty for likes.
“Now we’ve been forced to go back into the archives-Gacy, the Zodiac, Son of Sam. Hell we just did a five part series on Lizzy Borden. I mean, sure she’s a big name, but maybe a little passe?
“We need our audience to really empathize with the characters, particularly the victims. We want every listener to think that she too could be murdered at any moment, even in the most mundane situations, and by the person she’s least likely to suspect (her husband). If every listener isn’t immediately overcome with a powerful sense of vulnerability, and a deep suspicion of every stranger she happens to meet, or husband she happens to be married to, than we’re not doing our job.
“But the more we rely on the old standards, the less likely we are to connect with our audience in that way that makes them say, ‘that could be my headless body found in a swamp.
”I mean Jack the Ripper, for all his juice, just doesn’t evoke that kind of connection, that type of empathic bond between listener and mutilated corpse. We just want to make sure that we’re not cannibalizing (so to speak) all the best material.
“So I’d just like to send a little message out there to all would-be murderers. First off, you shouldn’t murder. It’s bad. But if, for whatever reason, you find yourself in a situation where you’re thinking about murdering, (again not encouraging), maybe just think about spicing it up a little. I mean you’re going to do what you’re going to do, so you might as well add some flair. It doesn’t necessarily have to include mutilation-beheading, flaying, scalping, dismemberment, disembowelment,- you know, the classics. But let’s just say it doesn’t hurt (so to speak). Our stats show a 20 percent uptick in downloads when the murder involves some sort of bodily desecration. Just throwing that out there. The point is, be creative! Kill outside the box! But also, you know, maybe don’t kill?”