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.
