A True Crime Pet Peeve
As some of y’all may know, I am a voracious consumer of true crime podcasts. I am constantly finding trashy new murder podcasts to binge, some of which are the audio versions of seedy tabloid television shows.
You can’t listen to as many true crime podcasts as I do without thinking about the medium as a whole and everything that goes into it. True crime podcasts are researched, written, performed and improvised. Sometimes they’re researched and written so brilliantly that you never think about the writing because you’re so immersed in the lurid yarn that’s being told.
And sometimes you DEFINITELY think about the writing because it’s so clumsy. When my copy was particularly clunky or unnatural the producer of my old television show Movie Club with John Ridley used to wince and complain that you could really HEAR my writing and to make it more natural.
A similar dynamic is at play with sub-par true crime podcasts: they’re so forced and artless that you end up thinking about the incompetent podcaster in front of a microphone trying and failing to do justice to a blood-soaked story rather than the story itself.
That is the case with my latest tacky true crime obsession, Sex, Lies & Murder. Like pretty much half the podcasts I listen to, it’s monomaniacally devoted to stories involving murder as well as betrayal, infidelity and various other crimes and transgressions.
Sex, Lies & Murder isn’t good. It’s run of the mill true crime/tabloid TV fodder: lurid, sensationalistic and vulgar. But if it’s not what I would call good it’s good enough to distract me while I do laundry or take my dog for a walk or any of the other mindless chores that fill up my life as a self-employed, stay at home house husband and father.
The podcast is every bit as generic and pandering as its title would suggest. What both amuses and enrages me about Sex, Lies & Murder is that on pretty much every episode the crime being chronicled or the characters involved are compared to a movie or a television show.
Sometimes this happens more than once. Sometimes it happens several times in quick succession. I have listened to dozens upon dozens of true crime podcasts of varying levels of quality and this is the only podcast where stories and people are constantly being compared to popular movies.
Oh sure, sometimes a true crime podcast will invoke an iconic movie as being similar to the crime being discussed but that’s generally only if the crime very closely resembles the plot of a classic film but in my experience it’s pretty rare. That is for a very good reason: it’s lazy as hell. It’s the definition of hack. It’s insultingly lazy.
Good true crime podcasts don’t compare the murders they’re documenting to hit motion pictures for the same reason that good screenplays don’t describe a character as looking and talking exactly like Tom Cruise. It’s a form of cheating that piggy-backs shamelessly on our memories of classic entertainment rather than do the work of bringing a crime to life through words without resorting to the lazy shorthand of saying that it was just like Dexter, The Usual Suspects or The Postman Always Rings Twice.
In a particularly unfortunate instance of this cliche, the boiler room where an aggressive businessman works is called a “real life version of The Wolf of Wall Street”, which is crazy considering that Wolf of Wall Street is based on a true story. The real life version of The Wolf of Wall Street is already The Wolf of Wall Street, which makes the comparison redundant as well as dumb and lazy.
Thankfully Sex, Lies & Murder is the only podcast I’ve listened to with this weird, pervasive shortcoming. It’s probably too late for them to go back and cut all the movie references from previous episodes but on the minuscule chance that they encounter this sure to be poorly read blog post perhaps it will shame them into not comparing everything to entertainment in the future.
Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!