December 30, 2024

The worst true crime of 2024

the true crime that's worth your time

Best Evidence’s tagline is "the true crime that's worth your time," and that's one of the reasons we do this annual Year in Review series — we want to make sure the true crime that is most worth your time gets its due. But it is also fun to complain about things! Hence today's question: What was the most irritating/frustrating/disappointing true crime property of the year?

Our panel of experts, many of whom are creators, themselves, are lovely and diplomatic folks. But they still didn't hold back given the opportunity to call out any egregious offenders. We hope you'll do the same in the comments.

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, as well as the best documentaries, longreads, podcasts, books, dramatic adaptations, and hidden gems.

If I didn't stick around to finish it, I can't write about it. But that perhaps speaks to where true crime is at right now as an entertainment vehicle: a lot of it is just plain uninteresting, narratively, visually, in audio or text. It's not even at the level of bad necessarily! Just...meh.— Sarah Weinman, author & editor

I wrote about the alleged manipulation of photos in Netflix series What Jennifer Did, and remain uncomfortable with that aspect of the series: As Tracy notes below, it's alleged that the filmmakers used AI to generate altered images for the show, and if true, that's not great. But even if it wasn't AI, and a regular old human futzed with the photos, that's a problem, as Kate Middleton might even note. (A producer for the series has denied the AI claims.) Even more troubling, as I noted in my review, is that the filmmakers fail to note, until a final-screen endcard, that new trials were ordered for Jennifer Pan and her alleged co-conspirators nearly a year before the show's release, news that appears to undercut the open-and-shut presentation of case details. Sarah Weinman is right that a lot of true crime is "meh," but leaving out the facts to make it less so isn't the solution to that problem. Better writing, analysis, and filmmaking is — Eve Batey, Best Evidence co-editor, journalist, and sighthound person.

A tie for what I find the most irritating/frustrating/disappointing (I hope short lived) trend in true crime properties, the use of A.I. Both What Jennifer Did and Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam used A.I. either surreptitiously (in What Jennifer Did) or explicitly (Dirty Pop), but in both instances I found it indicative of a lazy and unethical approach to getting clicks. [As noted above, a producer for What Jennifer Did denies the AI allegations—EB] — Tracy Bealer, author of True Crime Fiction on Substack

Lots to choose from here and I can't WAIT to see how many people vote Feud, but for me it's American Sports Story, which imo shouldn't have gotten made about this topic and which I didn't bother finishing; the Dick Wolf docs; and Manhunt. None of these is bad, exactly, but the distance between what was possible/hoped for and what we got was unfortunate   — Sarah D. Bunting, co-EIC of B.E., proprietrix of Exhibit B. Books

SASHA REID AND THE MIDNIGHT ORDER promised much and gave mush. After the fascinating MASTERMIND: TO THINK LIKE A KILLER about the pioneering FBI Behavioural Unit profiler Dr Ann Burgess, I was interested to meet her successors. But SASHA REID (the documentary) frames the accomplished Dr Sasha Reid and her highly qualified human rights & justice group as a scooby gang of ultra-femme citizen sleuths. Bleargh— Sarah Carradine, co-host of the Crime Seen podcast

Netflix's Can I Tell You a Secret was based on a very well done podcast series from 2022: it's a catfishing story with a hook, and should be at least entertaining. You can't fit all of the material from a podcast into a much shorter documentary version, but the producers here really tried, resultng in a mess that's both overstuffed, glosses over everything that's interesting and seems to want us to feel sympathy for the perpetrator. Nope on all counts.— Dan Cassino, Professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University

A tossup between The Jinx: Part Two, which skipped any kind of critical examination of its own role in the case, and The Real CSI: Miami, which remains a mystery because somehow there's aa reality TV version of CSI: Miami that just breezes past the fucking forensic science! — Andy Dehnart, founder of reality blurred

RADIOACTIVE: The Karen Silkwood Mystery — Elon Green, author of The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York (coming on March 11, 2025)

Not a specific property, but I found the whole hullabaloo over the 20th anniversary of Scott Peterson's conviction (for the murder of his wife Laci and their unborn child) and the "did he really do it?" takes quite irritating. — Susan Howard, Best Evidence contributor (Instagram: @veronicamers)

I dunno what the pitch was for the BBC's The Misinvestigations of Romesh Ranganathan - take a comedian known for his Washed Dad persona, pair him up with a chirpy criminal pyschologist who has never heard of Jimi Hendrix, and then let the two of them... try to solve the mystery of Hendrix's death? Or Tupac's killing? Or Nancy Spungen's murder? The biggest riddle is why it was commissioned in the first place, but we can skip the inquest and let it sleep with the fishes instead. Dishonourable mention: I had NFT-levels of hype for Chris Smith's Biggest Heist Ever but what a mouldy teatowel of a documentary, only redeemed by the scenes where the couple's friends all gleefully slag off their wedding. — Margaret Howie, co-founder of Space Fruit Press