The Best True Crime to Stream: Viral Stories With a Twist

These days, it’s common for a true crime story to go viral, but that interest often gathers momentum only after an investigation, documentary, podcast or online conversation brings to light a previously unfamiliar saga. For this streaming list, I wanted to look instead at stories that were, to some degree, viral already, and where that buzz was essential to the yarn itself — altering or shaping the unusual events. Here are four memorable offerings.

Documentary film

“The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker”

Caleb McGillvary, known as Kai, may have been among the first so-called milkshake ducks, a term for a noncelebrity who delights the internet, only to fall from grace.

In 2013, he was interviewed for an on-the-scene news segment in which he recounted how he had intervened to stop a crime while hitchhiking in Fresno, Calif. The video, where he is referenced as “Kai, the Homeless Hitchhiker With a Hatchet” quickly went viral, and McGillvary — a goofy, charismatic, eccentric vagabond — was hailed as a hero.

Quickly came a bonanza of memes and television appearances — including a segment on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — as well as talks of his own reality show. But the good times didn’t last. A few months later, he was arrested on charges that he had killed a man in New Jersey.

This 2023 Netflix documentary, from the director Colette Camden, unpacks McGillvary’s internet fame, the subsequent fallout and his murder trial. It also serves as a time capsule of sorts, capturing the frenetic pace and fickle mood of American web culture in the mid-2010s.