Our minor interest in the true crime genre has turned into a major obsession in the last few years, a boon for those churning it out but an increasingly troubling point of discussion for many others. Podcasts and documentaries excitedly recounting gruesome details of killers and their prey have created a specific type of creepily invested superfan, one parodied on Saturday Night Live in 2021, usually seen as female and often suburban, boldly sharing their theories on Facebook groups, uneasily defining their No 1 hobby as “murder”.
While Hulu’s starry hit Only Murders in the Building used a feather-light touch in imagining what would happen if podcast fans became hosts and then detectives, Peacock’s glossy new series Based on a True Story adds a serrated edge to an adjacent set-up, upping PG cosiness into R-rated excess. It’s not always successful (the violence is so discordantly nasty that it feels almost juvenile) but there’s a sleek, elevated ease to proceedings and a novel twist employed early on that transforms it from being a whodunnit to something relatively unusual.
