Last year’s Serial—a 12-episode podcast investigating the 1999 murder of a Baltimore student—sparked a phenomenon. Each week, millions of listeners anxiously looked to their smartphones, tablets, and computers for new installments of the true-crime drama to appear. Serial set off a slew of social media chatter, think pieces, and more podcasts. “In the normally low-profile world of podcasting,” wrote Ellen Gamerman of The Wall Street Journal, “Serial is a certified sensation—a testament to the power of great storytelling.”

Serial cocreator and narrator Sarah Koenig recounts the case of Adnan Syed, a man convicted of strangling his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, during their senior year of high school. Serial’s first season ended ambiguously, refusing to definitively answer the basic question, “Did Syed kill Hae Min Lee?” But the show’s ambiguity only piqued listener interest. Serial quickly became one of the most popular podcasts in history, the fastest, according to Apple, to reach 5 million streams or downloads.

Similarly, HBO’s documentary series The Jinx captivated audiences in early 2015. Sketching the life of enigmatic millionaire Robert Durst, The Jinx tried to prove that Durst murdered his first wife, his best friend, and a next-door neighbor.

Arguably, The Jinx succeeded where Serial fell short. The final episode ended with Durst saying that he “killed them all, of course.” Durst’s apparent confession, combined with his arrest on the day of the show’s finale, incited strong commentary from the media and broader public. According to Canvs, a qualitative social TV platform, 35,108 tweets went out about The Jinx in the period surrounding its finale. Almost 11,000 exhibited some sort of emotional response.

The popular appeal of true-crime stories doesn’t seem to be waning. Listeners chipped in to fund season two of Serial, with a release date within the next year. There’s even a new podcast paid for by the Adnan Syed Trust, Undisclosed, taking its turn investigating Lee’s murder. And legendary documentarian Errol Morris recently announced plans to direct a six-part documentary series for Netflix.

Raised Stakes

This isn’t the first time we have been captivated by the true-crime subgenre, which typically deals with murders. While Truman Capote’s 1966 classic In Cold Blood brought mass appeal to true-crime literature, nonliterary true crime experienced a renaissance of sorts when Morris, then a relative unknown, presented the film The Thin Blue Line in 1988. The film, which examined the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer, threw light on judicial and law enforcement deficiencies and eventually led to the release of a convicted killer from death row.

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In a period when many critics began to question whether documentaries could reveal truth, The Thin Blue Line proved that true crime could be used to help solve criminal cases as well as critique the justice system. Morris’s film reestablished “the viability and even centrality of truth value to documentary in a way that impacted the public sphere and society at large,” argued Charles Musser, who teaches film and media studies at Yale University.

If true crime can teach us anything, it’s that stories of real-life murder and mystery strike a deep, enigmatic chord in audiences. We can’t look away, and if we do, it’s because we’re busy researching the backstory on Wikipedia.

Why are we fascinated? One, for the same reason we enjoy good fiction: well-crafted narratives appeal to our imagination and emotions. True crime, however, elevates the stakes in a way that fiction cannot. While a good novelist constructs characters that generate empathetic responses, we know all along that we are not empathizing with flesh-and-blood people. We are responding to an idea.

By contrast, blood shed in true crime is blood shed in our world. This is one reason the subgenre often produces a strong visceral connection between subject and viewer: What these characters have done can’t be reversed or rebooted, and what happens to them has real-world consequences. True crime plays into our curiosity about how a person violates the canons of justice and justifies their behavior—and it plays into our yearning to see justice. As human beings created by a just and justice-seeking God, we are naturally attracted to these themes.

But also unlike fiction, true crime has the ability to produce positive social and personal change.

Becoming Activists

Serial ushered a stale case into the public forum, eventually leading the Maryland Court of Special Appeals to agree to hear arguments from Syed’s defense. The evidence uncovered by the producers of The Jinx indirectly resulted in Durst’s arrest.

True crime invites artists and audiences to become activists, and it often provides a microphone to those who have been silenced and marginalized. The credibility that ordinary audience members lend to these stories is key to the subgenre’s overall contribution. When large numbers of listeners simply talk about Serial and The Jinx with others, it indirectly puts pressure on authorities to reassess what they might otherwise ignore.

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We see the effects of this type of activism with Serial. Though Syed’s appeal is a long shot, listeners just might be the key to his freedom. “[C]ourts are often influenced by public opinion, and in the ‘court of public opinion’—as distinguished from the court of law—Syed is widely, though not universally, seen as the innocent victim,” noted lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz in The Guardian.

This unique opportunity to secure justice also comes with grave responsibility. Though the subgenre presents itself as an examination of truth, it can often subvert this ideal by sacrificing ethics for entertainment.

For example, many have noted how the producers of The Jinx purposely rearranged the story’s timeline to enhance the drama of the show’s conclusion. Other critics argued that the crew withheld vital evidence from the police in order to generate further publicity.

To be fair, it’s not either-or in true crime. Producers, directors, and writers work not only to reveal truth but to reveal truth in a way that engages the audience. Neither Serial nor TheJinx would have been successful if their respective producers had not been artful and deliberate. The question we must always ask is whether artistry is being used responsibly.

Wade Bearden is a writer and podcaster for Christ and Pop Culture.

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