"Best" Of 2022: The year's biggest disappointments
the true crime that's worth your time
For the last week or so, we’ve been talking with a prized panel of colleagues about the best (and the rest) true crime of 2022. Mostly, we’ve kept it positive, like yesterday’s look at the year’s hidden gems.
Not today! Today we’re venting about the most frustrating and/or disappointing genre outings of 2022.
I’ll go first: Keeper Of The Ashes. I expected better of everyone involved; not brilliance, necessarily, but not corny crap.
Take it away, panel! Readers, I’ll see y’all in the comments. — SDB
Tara Ariano, TV critic and co-host of Listen To Sassy: “As discussed on the TV podcast Extra Hot Great, The Girl From Plainville was ghoulish and absolutely unnecessary given the existence of I Love You, Now Die.”
Toby Ball, host of Strange Arrivals and co-host of Crime Writers On…: “I thought the true crime dramatization Inventing Anna was a lost opportunity. Anna Delvey's story seems like a natural for a walls-closing-in suspense treatment, but instead the show centers on the journalist investigating her shenanigans and we are left with the suspense of whether she'll finish the article before she goes into labor.”
Mark Blankenship, author of The Lost Songs Project and Reviews Editor at Primetimer: “I am still mad that I watched Running With the Devil, Netflix's trashy series about John McAfee. It valorizes him like he was some kind of bad-boy outlaw, and it tacitly celebrates the clickbait journalism that turned his deranged behavior into a major story. Plus -- spoiler alert -- it has the M. Night Shyamalan audacity to end with the suggestion that McAfee faked his own death and is still out there beating the system or whatever the hell. Spare me the low-rent theatrics, mofos.”
Sarah Carradine, co-host of Crime Seen: “Bad Vegan — what a crock (pot) of shit.”
Dan Cassino, professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University: “I was so excited by the prospect of M. Chris Fabricant’s Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System. Fabricant is a lawyer for the Innocence Project, and a book about the junk science on things like arson investigations and blood splatter is right up my alley. It got blurbed by John Grisham, for goodness’ sake. But what I was looking for and what Fabricant was doing wound up being two different things. I don’t know how you write a book about junk science and avoid any of the process-y bits that would make it revealing and entertaining, but Fabricant managed to pull it off. In his telling, there are good guys and bad guys and the good guys are the Innocence Project and the bad guys are the willfully stupid prosecutors and cops, and the process of how the evidence got to where it is goes out the window. It wasn’t a bad book, but was aggressively fine, rife with the written equivalent of a drone shot of a water tower in an unsuspecting town.”
Susan Howard, Best Evidence contributor: “Not a single property, but I would cite the insane amount of Lori Vallow/Chad Daybell content: at least two half-baked books, endless TV specials, and podcasts galore. Let’s put a pin in this one for now why don’t we.”
Margaret Howie, the co-founder of Space Fruit Press and editor of the Three Weeks newsletter: “Fuckin’ Dahmer. Not providing anything illuminating, tasteless, and the source of so much tedious discourse.”
Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and New York Times crime-fiction columnist: “I suppose any project involving Billy Jensen, for Reasons.”