New thinking about old cases (and the women in their headlines)
the true crime that's worth your time
Which true-crime properties of the past few years have shifted your thinking about the women at their centers? I won’t insult my esteemed colleague Kathryn VanArendonk by trying to nutshell her excellent piece from February, “The Limits of the Women’s Redemption Plot”; I’ll just urge you to read it, and provide a snip that talks about the broader experience of “empathy tourism” in prestige TV about ‘90s women:
It can feel so good to revisit a big cultural story from 30 years ago, to get the bracing dose of masochism that comes with excavating this woman’s pain (I’ve laughed at jokes like this. I’ve been part of the -problem) while feeling that now we can get the story right.
Earlier in the piece, VanArendonk mentions the evolution of certain woman-centric cases and stories from Jay Leno throwaway lines to prototypes for all the mistakes we made as a culture “back then,” and I have noticed in the last few years that we’re becoming better equipped to sit with the nuances of these stories, and a lot of prestige true crime is reflecting that (or trying to). Whether it’s Lorena, American Crime Story, Tonya Harding materials, Britney Spears materials, Catch & Kill, or other works entirely, which recent true crime made you reconsider a lady case figure you might have dismissed in the past? — SDB