10 Things Everyone Hates About Modern TV

2. The Ghoulish True Crime Documentary Boom

Loki finale
Netflix

If any single TV genre has enjoyed a massive uptick in popularity over the last few years, it's surely been the true crime documentary.

It's never been unpopular, but amid the streaming media boom, glossy deep-dive docs about serial killers and so on have become reliable staples for Netflix in particular.

Hell, the house style for modern true crime docu-series is cliched enough to have been brilliantly parodied by American Vandal a few years ago, and in 2021 there's practically a new serial killer doc being released every week to Netflix alone.

Now, there's obviously an audience for this - one which undeniably grew when we were all locked in our homes for most of last year - but it's also fair to say that so much of the content is majorly lacking in much personality at all.

By adhering to the same stylistic tropes over and over again, the obvious merit of the stories being told gets lost, as it becomes just another murder-doc series to add to the pile.

For every Making a Murderer or The Jinx, there are a dozen mediocre shows like The Raincoat Killer: Chasing a Predator in Korea.

The genre and its surging popularity has been the subject of much discussion in recent years, namely the over-the-odds focus on white, female victims - who, per missing white woman syndrome, are the most headline-worthy - and the soulless means through which these shows can commoditise grief and misery.

Movies and TV have of course exploited real suffering since their inception, yet it's never felt quite as gross and calculatedly slick as it does today, as an algorithm likely steers which stories are commissioned for their own fancy eight-part series and which are not.

Other ethical issues abound also, with shows like Don't F**k with Cats and Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel receiving intense criticism for granting a platform to amateur sleuths who arguably do far more harm than good.

Nobody's telling you you're a bad person for enjoying true crime shows, but the fact there's a cottage industry built around pumping out identikit docs is a little disconcerting, no?

Contributor
Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.