True-crime shows underscore flaws in media frenzies - The Columbus Dispatch

By Ellen GrayPhiladelphia Daily News

True-crime stories used to keep me awake some nights.

Truman Capote's “In Cold Blood” and Ann Rule's “The Stranger Beside Me” served as gateways to an addiction that left me nervous about violent crime, not to mention the possibility that casual acquaintances might be homicidal psychopaths.

When I eventually kicked the habit and returned to novels, I was able to breathe easier.

But then true-crime television went upscale, and I was forced to pay attention.

A millionaire murder suspect became an unlikely HBO star in Andrew Jarecki’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst — and ended up under arrest.

The success — and quality — of the Peabody Award-winning first season of the podcast “Serial,” and of shows such as Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” and FX’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” inspired new long-form projects.

The best of these shows can make us question our assumptions about a justice system that doesn’t work the way the rest of television might lead us to believe it does.

At the moment, I’m watching NBC's "Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders,” featuring Edie Falco as defense attorney Leslie Abramson. I’m intrigued by the involvement of “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf, who isn't known for being soft on crime, in a project that isn't necessarily pro-prosecution.

Wolf has talked about this “L&O” being unique for the franchise in having an “agenda." His take on brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez, sentenced to life without parole in the 1989 murders of their parents, is that the brothers got a raw deal.

“It’s absolutely horrible, but when you see the information, I think people are going to realize, well, yeah, they did it, but it wasn’t first-degree murder with no possibility of parole,” Wolf told reporters last month. “They probably should have been ... convicted of first-degree manslaughter.”

Crime stories involving the rich and famous have long drawn an audience — although, in the absence of both, you can count on most of the media attention going to victims (and/or perpetrators) who are young, attractive and white.

“The Murder of Laci Peterson,” which attempts to introduce reasonable doubt about the guilt of Scott Peterson in the deaths of his wife and their unborn son, checks all of those boxes.

By the end of the series, I couldn’t say whether Peterson, who was sentenced to death and is appealing his conviction, was a two-timing husband who killed his pregnant wife or just a two-timing husband whose wife’s death could have been more fully investigated. But I did know a lot more about what I didn’t know about the case — and I’m pretty sure that Nancy Grace will figure in some future nightmare.

What I didn’t get from the series is the sense that I’ve learned anything that truly mattered to anyone but the people involved.

“The People v. O.J. Simpson” was important television because it showed the disconnect between the perceptions of viewers watching the case on television and the jurors, effectively explaining a verdict that many people had long found inexplicable.

What this wave of true-crime television could teach us, if we let it, is to question how much of what we hear about crime is true. We might see flaws in the way crimes were investigated and prosecuted — flaws that are easily missed amid a media frenzy.

That's meaningful, though, only if it changes the way we approach the next media frenzy.

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