Crime is down, but you wouldn't know it from TV - Berkshire Eagle (subscription)

By Neil Genzlinger, 2017 New York Times  The crime rate in the United States remains considerably lower than it was a few decades ago, but not on your television. True-crime programs are seemingly everywhere these days, with early June bringing yet another new batch. As with zombie stories and scripted police procedurals, it seems as if this genre has no saturation point.

On Friday HLN, a channel in the CNN family, began "Beyond Reasonable Doubt," a show that focuses on cases in which forensic science provided a breakthrough. On Monday TV One adds "#Murder," featuring cases involving social media, to its "True Crime Monday" lineup. The longtime leader in the true-crime field, Investigation Discovery, goes to Las Vegas for "Sin City Justice," which begins Thursday and promises a real-time format to tell crime stories "with unprecedented access and unfiltered emotions."

These and other newcomers are adding to what already seems like a glut. The basic-cable band is full of titles like "Fatal Attraction," "Fear Thy Neighbor" and "Hear No Evil," and mainstream prime-time docu-shows like "48 Hours" have been milking crime for years.

More recently, HBO has been going after the true-crime audience with some of its Monday night documentaries, like last month's "Mommy Dead and Dearest," about a bizarre case in Missouri.

Running out of titles

So much of this is out there that we may be running out of titles. That new HLN series, "Beyond Reasonable Doubt"? Don't confuse it with "Reasonable Doubt," an Investigation Discovery series that began in April.

It also sometimes seems as if we were running out of crimes.

The initial episode of "Beyond Reasonable Doubt" is interesting enough, but it's about the Green River Killer case in Washington state, which has been thoroughly picked over in the years since Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty in 2003.

Remember the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, who in 1996 were convicted of killing their parents?

Of course you do, since their case has been rehashed repeatedly on true-crime programs, including the two-hour special "Truth and Lies: The Menendez Brothers — American Sons, American ...(Continued on next page)

Murderers," seen in January on ABC. Need a refresher? Investigation Discovery serves up "Blood Ties: The Menendez Brothers" next Saturday, and on June 11, Lifetime has a TV movie called "Menendez: Blood Brothers," followed by a documentary, "Beyond the Headlines: Murder in the Family," billed as "five stories of children who killed a parent."

Or, you can wait for Dick Wolf's docu-series on the Menendez case, expected in the fall.

Of course, in the past few years, we've seen that true crime can be elevated to art in the right hands. "The Jinx," the Emmy-winning HBO miniseries about Robert Durst that caused a stir in 2015, set a high bar, and every six months or so, an offering comes along that rivals it in quality: "Making a Murderer" on Netflix in 2015, "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" on FX in 2016.

'The Keepers'

The current example is "The Keepers," a seven-episode Netflix series about the murder of a Baltimore nun in the 1960s. What separates a series like "The Keepers" from its lower-quality cousins? Patience. Depth. A willingness to break out of an assembly-line format that has become numbing: talking heads describing developments in the case, intercut with often cheesy re-enactments.

The initial episode of "#Murder," for instance, involves a Brooklyn teenager, Shaniesha Forbes, who was lured to her death in 2013 by a man she met online. It's a heartbreaking story, but it's told in such boilerplate fashion that it loses some of its power. Several journalists, sitting in chairs, relate details of the case so woodenly that it sometimes sounds as if they were reading cue cards.

By contrast, the opening of "The Keepers" features a journalist, Tom Nugent, rummaging through his attic and speaking from the heart about the long-ago case and why it still haunts him.

No need to wait for a crime to be confirmed, by the way. On Monday night Investigation Discovery has "Bill Cosby: An American Scandal"; CNN has scheduled "The Case Against Cosby"; and there will probably be others. And Cosby's sexual assault trial will only have begun that day.

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