The branding of “true crime”, the genre that has made millionaires of many Netflix shareholders, might appear tautological. After all, why wouldn’t a crime be “true”? But after centuries of fictionalisation – from Arthur Conan Doyle to Richard Osman – “true crime”, a genre popularised in the last decade, felt like a rebellion against convention. No locked rooms, no moustachioed detectives, no red herrings – and a focus, finally, on crime as it impacts its victims. The Following Events are Based on a Pack of Lies is, as it says, not true crime. Instead, this twisty BBC One thriller learns the lessons of the genre and nimbly transposes them onto an overwrought imagined canvas.
Alice (Rebekah Staton) leads a quiet life in Oxford with her partner, son and elderly father. But the simplicity of this existence is punctured when she recognises a man on the street, purporting to be a “disruptive explorer” called Robert Chance (Alistair Petrie). She identifies him as her ex-husband – who ran off with the family money – and notes, with increasing horror, that this cuckoo is about to strike again. “Whatever it is, it’s a long way from dodgy property scams,” Alice observes, as Robert cosies up to bestselling fantasy author Cheryl Harker (Marianne Jean-Baptiste).
