Happily Never After: Dan & Nancy and audio "comfort food"
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
On the morning of June 2, 2018, students arrived at the Oregon Culinary Institute to find their instructor, Chef Dan Brophy, dead of two gunshot wounds. His widow, Nancy Crampton-Brophy, was a romance novelist, ish, who juuuust so happened to have written a blog post several years prior called "How to Murder Your Husband."
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The story
Wondery's latest true-crime offering, the six part Happily Never After: Dan & Nancy, drops today after making its Wondery Plus debut last month, and there's not a single unexpected thing here, good or bad…which got me thinking: do we need a phrase like "hotel TV," but for true-crime podcasts or audiobooks?
If you don't listen to the Extra Hot Great family of pods, 1) come on by, we have a good time; 2) you may not know what "hotel TV" means. Very broadly, it's the sort of B-minus, barely serialized, fundamentally unserious cop or mystery procedural you wouldn't seek out at home – but in a hotel, waiting for/enjoying room service or putting your feet up between the wedding ceremony and the reception, you'll happily Pringles three or four episodes in a row, and just as happily leave in the middle of the third act because basically you know what happens. The CSIs, Castle, USA's aughts shows…you get the gist.
The Happily Never After experience is very similar, IMO. Listening to the first two episodes, narrated ably and with an appropriate top note of "get a load of this shit" by Heidi Joy Tretheway, I realized it had been a minute since I listened to a Wondery audio product, and I was quite content to be reunited with these predictable, professional builds and beats. I also realized I would be equally happy to pause Happily Never After mid-narration sentence and not return to it. What do we call that, the kind of audio story you could easily listen to for hours and hours without getting truly restless – but, once your plane ride or drive down the shore is done, so are you?
I'll let you mull that over while I talk a little more about why I think a case like Dan Brophy's murder is so well suited for a production outfit like Wondery. This is absolutely one of those stories that, in the end, isn't much, past the "(end of) life imitating art" logline. If you do already know the "story beats" here – and if you don't, and you want to listen to the podcast, hop to the end so you don't get spoiled – and what happened in court, it's not one of those cases that stands for anything larger than itself or that benefits from irising out for cultural context or commentary. Aside from the "novelist outs herself years in advance with plotting notes" twist up top, it's dead center of the "greedy killer isn't as smart as they thought" fairway.
So if you want penetrating insight into the Brophy killing, or the complicated world of the introverted mushroom-forager, or whatever, Happily Never After isn't for you, but if you want intel, it's perfect. Wondery has years of experience in podcast construction, and that includes identifying cases that don't require advanced degrees, either to package or to comprehend. Someone got killed, someone else acted weird, we talked to a lady who pulled on a thread, now we're in court, next.
Back to the nomenclature, and the fact that "midcast" and "mid-iobook" suggest themselves, but don't really reflect how positively I feel towards hotel TV (not exactly the same as what my esteemed colleague James Poniewozik dubbed "mid TV," but within a Venn overlap). The kind of true crime I listen to at bedtime, nothing too grisly or involving "special victims," compendia of con artists or Victorian love fraudsters that let me drift off mid-chapter without guilt; Wondery podcasts I don't have to give my full attention if I'm negotiating a Lowe's parking lot; engaging enough, but not too involved – not insistent. What's a couple steps down in strength from "spellbinding"?
…"Audequate"? "Ear-death experience" isn't right..."quilt trip," because it's comfortable? "Famili…ear"? Y'all, help me, I suck at this.
Wondery does not, and Happily Never After is a perfectly cromulent listen, but if you already know the ending, you can spend time on something else.