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.
Originally envisioned as a straight drama by The Boys writer Craig Rosenberg, which might explain the tonal unease, Based on a True Story is instead played as a goofy comedy thriller balancing satire, sitcom and suspense, a balance that tracks for lead star Kaley Cuoco. Stuck within the restrictive yet lucrative confines of CBS sitcom hell with The Big Bang Theory for almost 300 episodes, she made the unexpected leap to more prestige-y fare with HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, bringing her critical acclaim and nominations from awards bodies that had previously refused to register her. She’s in similar mode here, for better and worse, sometimes a little bigger than the material requires but confident enough to sell silliness that others might have fumbled. She plays Ava, heavily pregnant and rather bored, treading water at her job in real estate and craving sex with strangers. The majority of her enthusiasm is reserved for her obsession with true crime, especially as a serial killer known as the Westside Ripper continues to wreak havoc in her neighbourhood.
Her husband Nathan (Chris Messina) rolls his eyes at her murder fixation but shares a similar sense of a life unfulfilled, once a tennis player tipped for stardom, now teaching pampered children at a local club. When they accidentally happen upon the identity of the Westside Ripper, they uncharacteristically choose not to follow the safe route, hanging up on 911 and instead, blackmailing him to stop slaying and collaborate on a podcast with a killer gimmick.
With the question of whodunnit answered within the first episode (although critics have been sworn to secrecy about the killer’s identity), the ensuing season is tasked with finding other ways to keep us guessing. Jeopardy is eked out of the far-fetched precariousness of the arrangement and the extreme levels of trust that it requires – can their secret be contained and can a killer’s thirst really be controlled – as well as the more pressing issues around ensuring their podcast is a success. There are nods to how the amorality of the situation is reflective of a real-world thirst for violent content without questioning or caring about the people affected but the tone is too sprightly for any of that to stick for very long which is probably for the best as it could then be a case of having one’s cake and eating it too. For the show is as ebulliently violent as a slasher movie, gleefully revelling in the killer’s flesh-piercing panache, a surprise given the bright, sitcom-y vibe yet less so when you remember how Rosenberg’s best-known show The Boys also employed splatter gore in comedic situations. It’s effectively gnarly yet is often married with an increasingly ineffective trick of revealing that we’re actually in a fantasy sequence, an overused device that loses its element of surprise fast.
Messina and Cuoco keep us glued though, the former’s more grounded background in dramatic work helping to calm some of the latter’s broader sitcom instincts. Their marital inertia isn’t particularly distinctive but their chemistry is, convincing us into buying a string of dim-witted decisions. There are also neat supporting turns from Tom Bateman, Priscilla Quintana and a great Liana Liberato, extending her sex-positive bit player with spot-on comic timing from Scream VI.
With credulity crumbling by the end of eight mostly enjoyable, if increasingly ludicrous, episodes, Based on a True Story might not have enough blood to pump through another season (even if a cliffhanger ending suggests that it will happen anyway), but murder fans should find enough here to chew on.
Based on a True Story is now available on Peacock with a UK date to be announced
