Best Of 2022: True crime's hidden gems
Plus cop-drama drama, and engraging (?) longreads
the true crime that's worth your time
For the last week or so, we’ve been talking with a prized group of colleagues about the best (and the rest) true crime of 2022: what they liked, what they unearthed from The Before Time, what they’re looking forward to in 2023.
Yesterday, we talked about older genre properties they discovered in 2022. Today, they’re signal-boosting stuff that might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
Mark Blankenship, author of The Lost Songs Project and Reviews Editor at Primetimer: “Well, Mind Over Murder certainly deserved more attention than it got, but I'm going to nominate Spector, Showtime's nuanced and moving look at the record producer Phil Spector and the actress Lana Clarkson, whom he murdered. I used that slightly awkward phrasing because the series does such a good job of making Clarkson more than just ‘the woman Phil Spector killed.’ It lets us know her, and it lets us know him, and it leaves us to ponder the various tragedies that pushed them together.”
Tara Ariano, TV critic and co-host of Listen To Sassy: “I don't know how overlooked it ACTUALLY was, but I felt like it wasn't in the conversation as much as a lot of the other scam miniseries were: WeCrashed was really excellent and well built and Anne Hathaway was doing career-best work in it.
We Own This City was also urgent and furious and beautifully made the case for why defunding the police is the absolute least governments should try to do...but how probably impossible it is to reform institutions that are completely and endemically corrupt.”
Susan Howard, Best Evidence contributor: “The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup by Evan Hughes. I thought this was an excellent read (think Bad Blood meets Empire of Pain), but it hardly seemed to make a splash.”
Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel and New York Times crime-fiction columnist: “Two books that I thought would get greater attention were Slenderman by Kathleen Hale and The Hard Sell by Evan Hughes, both excellent works of narrative crime nonfiction. Maybe in paperback they'll get greater visibility? I sure hope so.”
David Bushman, author of Murder At Teal’s Pond: “I'm sure you know my answer to this.”
Toby Ball, host of Strange Arrivals and co-host of Crime Writers On…: “I really like Burn Wild, Leah Sottile's podcast about the Earth Liberation Front and the way federal law enforcement responded to a group that committed its violence against property in an effort to wake people up about the environmental catastrophe we are causing.”
Sarah Carradine, co-host of Crime Seen: “Walkley Award-winning Australian docuseries EXPOSED: The Ghost Train Fire (ABC). [As of this writing, it’s available on Vimeo. — SDB]”
I have a short list of titles that didn’t get talked about post-release as much as I’d thought they would (Welcome To Chippendales, for one, although I’m told it’s pretty good), but most of them don’t qualify as “hidden gems.” I do think Black Bird should have gotten more play; HBO doc The Janes was outstanding; I’ll also mention, again, OG podcast Breakdown from AJC as doing careful, consistent, unglamorously straightforward investigative work.
And I really enjoyed talking with photographer Theo Wenner about his book, and the ways knowing about the making of a book like Homicide can inform how we consume true crime.
Which true crime, in whatever medium, did you think should have trended bigger in 2022? — SDB
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Does showrunner David “Graz” Graziano’s alleged reign of terror over the Law & Order: SVU writers’ room — and others (…allegedly) — count as true crime? Probably not. I’ve included it in today’s issue anyway, though, because
a few of the allegations are in the neighborhood of misdemeanors;
Graziano himself claims to have survived early-life trauma of what seems to be a criminal nature;
the show rips many cases from the headlines for use in its own stories; and
Graziano is said to have…been content to let people think he would fuck them up physically?
Graziano liked to regale colleagues with stories about his self-described rough past. In the same Today.com interview he recounted seeing “a murder happen in front of me when I was a teenager, and it got me obsessed with why people do the things they do — particularly with respect to criminality and human nature, the dark parts of human nature.”
Four former colleagues during the course of several years said that he also shared stories of engaging in physical altercations with people, although they said they were skeptical the incidents actually occurred.
“I think it was a form of warning, don’t f— with me, there’s physical jeopardy here,” said a writer, who worked with him on a drama series.
Graziano, through a rep, denied each and all claims, although he concedes that he was tough to work with on Coyote thanks to neck pain. None of the other bold-type names connected with the show commented for the LAT’s story.
Perhaps not unrelated: it seems like the show keeps losing women from the acting corps, and that the actors a) didn’t choose to leave the show and b) found out, like, on social media or by getting called for comment? “Twice” is not a capital-T Thing, necessarily, but when Jamie Gray Hyder and Kelli Giddish leave within the same calendar year, and both seem kind of taken aback by their own departures…you wonder if some actionable shit isn’t going on.
Like I said, probably more a union matter than a criminal one, but as one of maybe a dozen people still watching SVU, I didn’t want to pass up a chance to gossip about it. — SDB
Wrapping up today’s edition with a few more relevant reads…
New York’s “39 Reasons to Love New York,” no. 13 [Curbed] // A hostage negotiation turned into a decades-long friendship.
“Peacock's New Docuseries 'Paul T. Goldman' Blends Comedy With True Crime” [Oxygen] // The series,
executive produced by Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, tells the story of Paul T. Goldman, a single father who falls for a woman he met online. The thing is, the woman he fell in love with — and even married — isn't exactly who she portrayed herself as.
Instead, as Goldman says in the trailer released Wednesday, he finds out that his wife has been leading a "secret double life." As he does his own investigation into her story, he gets the FBI and more individuals involved in bringing down an alleged crime ring, creating a story that grabbed the attention of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm director Jason Woliner.
That could go a few different ways, and I don’t know that I like them all, but I’ll check it out when it drops January 1. Official trailer is below!
“How Hospice Became A For-Profit Hustle” [New Yorker] // Ava Kofman’s expansive, enraging look at hospice/Medicare fraud made me realize how lucky my family was at the end of my mother’s life — for a number of reasons, but particularly with the hospice outfit. The health-“care” system in this country never seems to run out of ways to re-break. — SDB
Tomorrow on Best Evidence: Our panel isn’t mad; they’re just disappointed. (Also sometimes they are in fact mad.)
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