Whisper it, but the true-crime documentary bubble may have burst. There are now objectively more documentaries than there is actual crime, and this is manifesting itself in a peculiar way. In the old days (read: about 18 months ago), the best way to identify a bad true-crime documentary was to look up the crime online. If you could learn more about it from a five-minute Wikipedia scan than by sitting through an entire series, that told you the show’s worth.
But now that the true-crime genre has been overloaded, there is another way. That is to scroll to the bottom of Wikipedia and see how many other shows have previously been made about the same crime. You see, film-makers are now so busy crawling over one another for scraps that there are very few crime stories being told for the first time. Maybe there was a film about it, or a dramatisation. There will almost certainly have been other documentaries made and, conservatively, about seven or eight hundred podcasts.
So it is with Santa Claus The Serial Killer (BBC Three). The series concerns itself with the spate of young gay men who were murdered in Toronto between 2010 and 2017. If that sounds familiar, it might be because you have watched CBC’s Murder in the Village (2017). Or CBC’s Village of the Missing (2019). Or CBC’s The Detectives (2020). Or the film Catching a Serial Killer: Bruce McArthur (2021). Or maybe you read Justin Ling’s Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System That Failed Toronto’s Queer Community (2020). Or maybe you’re Swedish, and own a radio, and you heard the episode of Verkligheten i P3 about the murders (2021).
Now, you can discern two things from this glut of content. The first is that this is a truly fascinating story. The story that Santa Claus The Serial Killer tells is, in turns, heartbreaking and galling. Between 2010 and 2017, eight men went missing from Church and Wellesley, Toronto’s gay district. Eventually, a 66-year-old gardener called Bruce McArthur was arrested. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is thought that McArthur would have been caught much faster, but the missing men were primarily gay and brown-skinned, and many believe their cases were deprioritised by an institutionally racist and homophobic police force.
The second thing is that, as well intentioned as it may be, Santa Claus The Serial Killer probably isn’t going to reveal much in the way of new information. This is fine, so long as the show doesn’t actively go out of its way to present itself as an investigation rather than a retelling of existing information. But guess what? That’s exactly what Santa Claus The Serial Killer does.
The case is told through the eyes of Mobeen Azhar, a journalist who is usually much better than this. Azhar’s appointment makes some degree of sense – he is gay and Muslim, which lends him much more authority than if this had been presented by, say, Stacey Dooley – but the sheer cheek of him pretending to solve the cases himself is unforgivable.
As Azhar watches reports (seen in other documentaries) and interviews talking heads (mostly likewise), he goes about pinning photos and notes to a wall, as if he was Carrie from Homeland during one of her manic episodes. The whole thing is framed as Azhar working this whole thing out for himself, rather than absent-mindedly Googling “Toronto serial killer 2010-2017” on his phone one afternoon.
There is also a frustrating lack of insight on his part. Getting in a cab in Toronto, he tells the taxi driver: “Canada is like America, but with less bullshit”, to a silent yet palpably hostile response. He visits a scrapyard, and repeatedly frets about the safety of his hire car. His closing summary at the end of this three-hour series is essentially a Jerry’s Final Thought. The series can’t escape the general ickiness of the genre, either. At times there is a sense that this is less an investigation and more a whistlestop tour of the Bruce McArthur murder tourism industry. These people have told their stories countless times now, and there is something truly unedifying about Azhar’s (and the audience’s) willingness to rubberneck at so much well-worn trauma. If you happen to have three hours to kill, Santa Claus The Serial Killer may be worth a watch. Don’t worry if not, though: there will probably be a dozen more shows on the same subject by Easter.
