True-Crime Has Gone from Guilty Pleasure to High Culture

Norman Weiss January 6, 2016, 8:09 am

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True-crime has gone from guilty pleasure to high culture

The kind of true-crime shows you’d find on Investigation Discovery has been popular for decades. Yet new programs like Making a Murderer and Serial have elevated true-crime to make it appetizing to the intellectual elite. “The genre has been wildly popular for decades, starting with pulp fiction and continuing through America’s Most Wanted and beyond,” explains Jake Flanagin. “The ascent of the ID channel mirrors the deep cultural appetite for true-crime media. Beginning in the last few years, however, what was once largely the realm of low-brow entertainment has entered high culture.” PLUS: Why are there suddenly so many crime anthology shows?, Making a Murderer has turned all of us into conspiracy theorists, and Twitter is having a field day with Making a Murderer memes.

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