True Crime & Storytelling: Who Deserves the Spotlight?Details
Location: Crimson Whiskey Bar (Either the downstairs whiskey bar, or main floor bar, TBD)
The purpose of Thinkers and Drinkers is to facilitate casual but meaningful and interesting conversations with other people in a face-to-face setting. The topics cover a wide variety of issues and are different for every meeting. While conversations may get heated at times, we ask that all members be respectful of each other and refrain from personal insults.
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**Contemporary True Crime & Storytelling Most Often Spotlights the Villains:**
***Is there a meaningful difference between understanding a killer and being fascinated by one? Where's the line?***
True crime has always been with us — penny dreadfuls, tabloids, In Cold Blood — but has something shifted in the recent decades. Podcasts like Serial and My Favorite Murder, docuseries like Netflix's Making a Murderer, and entire cable channels dedicated to murder-as-entertainment have turned real suffering into a booming content industry. Is that something to celebrate, scrutinize, or just sit with uncomfortably?
Is this part of a larger trend of glorifying the villain?
**Some angles worth sitting with:**
* The content boom has made this a business — and families are often the last to know. Crime Junkie, Netflix docuseries, Patreon true crime pods — someone is profiting every time a family's worst chapter gets a new season, and several have spoken publicly about learning a docuseries existed the same day the trailer dropped.
* The killer gets the marquee, the victim gets a footnote. Dennis Rader (BTK), Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Edmund Kemper — household names, all of them. The people they killed, largely not.
* Villains prominent in other entertainment: Sports, movies, videogames etc.
* Today's media villains are yesterday's killers. You, Dexter, (some other villain). The world is seen through their eyes and psychology, giving the viewer a sympathetic lense.
* Who gets covered is not random. Missing white woman syndrome is documented and measurable; the cases that become cultural touchstones say a lot about whose suffering we've decided is worth dramatizing.
* Not every famous case even has a killer to blame. JonBenét Ramsey has been a media fixture for nearly 30 years with no one ever charged — which raises the question of what we're actually chasing when there's no monster to pin it on.
**Questions to Consider:**
* Does true crime content actually make people safer, or is "awareness" mostly a guilt-free justification for what is really just entertainment?
* How many serial killers can you name? Can you name that many victims?
* Should producers and platforms be required to involve victims' families — or at minimum, notify them — before releasing content?
* Why do you think women make up the majority of true crime consumers, given that women are disproportionately the victims in these stories?
* Is the JonBenét phenomenon different in kind — or does an unsolved case just reveal more honestly what's driving the interest all along?
* Dahmer merch. Kemper fan accounts. At what point does documenting a killer's story tip into something more troubling?
**Major Survey’s include:**
**[https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-true-crime-consumer-report-by-edison-research-and-audiochuck/](https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-true-crime-consumer-report-by-edison-research-and-audiochuck/)**
**[https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/20/true-crime-podcasts-are-popular-in-the-us-particularly-among-women-and-those-with-less-formal-education/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/20/true-crime-podcasts-are-popular-in-the-us-particularly-among-women-and-those-with-less-formal-education/)**
**[https://www.bw.edu/academics/bios/cv/article-brian-monahan-timeless-kills.pdf](https://www.bw.edu/academics/bios/cv/article-brian-monahan-timeless-kills.pdf)**