December 31, 2024

Our hopes for true crime in 2025

the true crime that's worth your time

We've reached the final day of Best Evidence's annual Year in Review series, which you are presumably reading through a pair of those funny "2025" glasses and a Champagne fog. (Or, like me, you're just popping gummies all day to manage your anxiety over what lies ahead.)

Our panel of experts, bless them, did not just write "OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED" when asked this last question: What are your hopes for the true crime genre in 2025? However, you're welcome to vent to that end in the comments — or you can just answer the question, Claire.

Looking to catch up on our fourth annual Year in Review? Here are our rundowns of the best vintage true crime properties we discovered this year, the projects we’re most excited for in 2025, the worst true crime of 2024, and the best documentaries, longreads, podcasts, books, dramatic adaptations, and hidden gems of the year.

My hope is that true crime audiences continue to be discerning about the content they consume, willing to call out cash-grabs and exploitation. — Susan Howard, Best Evidence contributor (Instagram: @veronicamers)

That local journalism makes a much-deserved comeback. — Margaret Howie, co-founder of Space Fruit Press

I'm going to parrot something I told Neiman Lab earlier this fall: 2025 will be the year of covering crimes that were, until recently, not thought of as crimes. Meaning abortion, criminalizing miscarriages and dangerous pregnancies and everything related to maternal mortality and the bodily autonomy of anyone not a cis white heterosexual male. Meaning any right the Supreme Court decides to roll back. We're all going to become crime reporters now, whether we like it or not. — Sarah Weinman, author & editor

I wrote about the state of the theatrical documentary market last week, and was surprised by how rarely true crime came up: if there's one genre where streamers are gobbling pretty much any property up (making a theatrical release sort of financially pointless), it's the true crime doc space. That's good news for documentarians, who for so long couldn't make a living in the field. But it also — as we have all seen — opens the door to just so much crap. So a big wish of mine is that streamers, slow their rolls a bit and get choosier with content. You don't have to take everything that crosses your eyeline in hopes that it'll be the next Tiger King. — Eve Batey, Best Evidence co-editor, journalist, and sighthound person.

I hope less A.I.! But seriously, as for every year, I hope for more platforming of diverse voices and marginalized cases so the true crime universe can continue to reflect the flawed institutions and complicated pressures of American life. — Tracy Bealer, author of True Crime Fiction on Substack

Well, it's a strange fucken' time to be a true-crime consumer/reviewer, because fundamental communal understanding of the rule of law is, like, out the window as of Inauguration Day? If it isn't already. But that makes the kind of documentation, investigation, and reporting we respect and respond to absolutely critical -- that the Weinmans, Carrs, Radden Keefes, Greens, Barans, Sottiles, and W. Kamau Bells of the world keep telling stories of justice in all its timelines. Put another way, my hope is that the culture continues to value the genre as instructive. That's big picture. Small picture, I'd like dev execs to put rubber bands around their wrists with letter beads that spell the word "FEATURE," and every time they start spitballing a story into a 3-4 episode strip series, they need to snap that elastic and get the shit done in 98 minutes.   — Sarah D. Bunting, co-EIC of B.E., proprietrix of Exhibit B. Books

There seems to be a swell in true crime properties - the good ones - in examining the ripple effects of crime on families and community, going beyond the bare facts of who- and how-dunnit. I have hopes this trend will continue, and we will get more gritty conversation. — Sarah Carradine, co-host of the Crime Seen podcast

I hope true crime can adapt to meet the moment, telling true stories of real people in ways that call attention to systemic problems, rather than just exploiting cases for entertainment. — Andy Dehnart, founder of reality blurred

That it will incrementally get less bad. — Elon Green, author of The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York (coming on March 11, 2025)