Grant is the executive producer on The Murder Detectives (above), a three-part serialised documentary for Channel 4 about the murder of Nicholas Robinson in the English city of Bristol. “True crime and blue flashing light stories have changed,” says Neil Grant, managing director of Ten Alps/Zinc Media-owned UK indie Films of Record. The intel is clearly making an impression. “I’m passing that information back to producers.” “Broadcasters sit up the minute they hear Serial, The Jinx and Making a Murderer,” says Paul Heaney, founder and CEO of crime specialist distributor TCB Media Rights. Meanwhile, the second season of podcast Serial was the medium’s biggest ever launch.Ĭhannel acquisitions executives are no less enamoured, evidence suggests.
Has there been a more talked-about genre than serialised true crime programming in the past year in international television? Newspapers, websites and blogs have devoted thousands of column inches to the stories and theories around Netflix’s Making a Murderer and The Jinx: the Life and Deaths of Robert Durst from HBO, while friends and work colleagues spend hour upon hour discussing the minutiae of the cases presented. Jesse Whittock looks for evidence from those behind the shows to build a case for why it’s happening. A new wave of true crime series that ape the structure of serialised dramas has emerged on screens across the world.
