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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Family Matters

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      Four picks from television, films and podcasts that show blood is not always thicker than water.Family secrets, tumult and trauma are at the heart of so many — if not most — true crime stories, and breed some of the most bizarre betrayals. Here are four picks including podcasts, television and films that explore unforgettable crimes involving families, all of whom prided themselves on presenting a perfect image until the truth came crashing through the facade.Docuseries“Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal”Watching a true crime documentary that is following events that are presently unfolding — where those telling the tale also have no idea of what’s to come — is particularly gripping. And this tale of greed, corruption, outlandish cover-ups and murder in the lowcountry region of South Carolina is a doozy. It is, as the New York Times television critic Mike Hale put it, an “unbeatable crime story.”The first three-episode season, on Netflix, premiered midway through the trial of the family’s patriarch, Alex Murdaugh: the disgraced personal injury attorney and an heir to the area’s legal dynasty, who was accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021. The second season picks up from there, covering the march to the verdict. Both seasons were released this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      LeVar Burton’s New ‘Sound Detectives’ Podcast Urges Children to Listen

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      The actor is engaging young audiences again with “Sound Detectives,” a comic mystery podcast that teaches the art of listening.LeVar Burton has spent much of his career encouraging children to read. Now he is urging them to listen — really listen.They can develop that skill, along with an ear for mysteries, in “Sound Detectives,” a new podcast for audiences of elementary-school age that is part whodunit, part science exploration and part comic adventure. Co-produced by SiriusXM’s Stitcher Studios and LeVar Burton Entertainment, “Sound Detectives” features Burton as a fictionalized version of himself, an inventor with the same name.“In a certain sense, ‘LeVar Burton’ has reached iconic status,” Burton said in a phone conversation. “And it’s fun for me to lean into that.” He added, “It’s also an opportunity for me to introduce ‘LeVar’ to another generation.”Many adults recognize Burton as the actor who played Kunta Kinte in “Roots” and Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, fans pushed for him to be named the host of “Jeopardy!,” a role for which he very publicly campaigned. But to large numbers of today’s parents, he is most familiar from their own childhoods as the host of the Emmy-winning public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.“LeVar Burton Reads,” his literary podcast for adults, has been downloaded more than 54 million times, according to SiriusXM.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe LeVar Burton of the 10-part “Sound Detectives,” which debuted on Wednesday — SiriusXM will release a new episode every week thereafter — is an audiophile planning to open a magnificent institution, the Museum of Sound. But he discovers that sounds are becoming separated from their sources and going missing.To resolve the crisis, he hires a Philip Marlowe-style sleuth, Detective Hunch, and sends him an assistant in the form of one of his own inventions: Audie, a 3-foot-5-inch-tall walking, talking ear. In each episode, Hunch and Audie must analyze an errant sound, identify it and return it to its origins, while also trying to unmask the Sound Swindler, the human culprit who is causing the disappearances.“Sound Detectives” is the real LeVar Burton’s first podcast for children, but he stressed that he did not see it as a long-awaited return to young people’s entertainment. “I don’t feel like I’ve ever left it,” he said. Burton, 66, who has remained active in children’s literacy through founding Skybrary, a digital library of e-books and videos, said he had not ruled out a young listener’s version of “LeVar Burton Reads,” his SiriusXM literary podcast. (According to the company, it has been downloaded more than 54 million times since its premiere six years ago.)But what appealed to him about “Sound Detectives” was that he did not have the burden of being the podcast’s sole maker or its star. The independent producers Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith (Smith is also the producer of “LeVar Burton Reads”) created the podcast and developed it with Burton before pitching it to Sirius XM. “Sound Detectives” focuses more on the private eye — and the accompanying ear — than on the famous voice that gives them their missions.To large numbers of today’s parents, Burton is most familiar as the host of the public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.PBSBurton also admired the plan for each episode’s end: Once the missing sound is returned, young listeners hear an on-location interview with real experts who deal with it in their work.The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said, and “it introduces them to parts of the world that they might not have yet been exposed to. And those are the key precepts that were the drivers to ‘Reading Rainbow.’”“Sound Detectives” visits places like Yellowstone National Park, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the streets of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India. When creating the missing-sound mystery for each half-hour episode, Smith and Sokolowski said in a video interview that they sometimes started with a site they found intriguing, and at other times with a sound. The sounds they chose can be challenging to identify; one example was recorded on Mars.“We hadn’t heard of another show that was dealing exclusively with sound as, like, the main narrative driver for a podcast,” Sokolowski said. “And it just seemed like a wonderful way to not only engage kids in the format, but also in the method and delivery and style and every aspect of the show.”Although the podcast industry is undergoing retrenchment, “Sound Detectives” is entering a children’s market that seems nowhere near saturation, said Megan Lazovick, a vice president at Edison Research, an analytics company in Somerville, N.J.Edison’s first national study of the children’s market (conducted recently with the advocacy organization Kids Listen) found that 29 percent of children ages 6 to 12 had listened to a podcast the previous month. That figure rose to 42 percent if their parents had also listened to one.Lazovick predicted that Burton’s association with “Sound Detectives” would be a big draw for parents. She mentioned how the new “Disney Frozen: Forces of Nature” podcast capitalized on the popularity of the “Frozen” film and its offshoots. “In the kids’ space, bringing in brands that are already trusted is sort of a no-brainer,” she said.Adam Sachs, SiriusXM’s senior vice president for entertainment, comedy and podcast programming, said that Burton was also a “huge factor” in the company’s commitment to the project.“Not only is he just a great podcast talent to work with, and we have a great track record with him,” Sachs said, “but he also has so much experience working in the kids’ content space that this sort of felt like the perfect opportunity for us to dip our toe in.” (SiriusXM declined to disclose the budget for “Sound Detectives.”)The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesSokolowski, who has a background in documentaries (among them, the films “Ovarian Psycos” and “Very Semi-Serious”), and Smith, who has experience in comedy (including the podcasts “Judge John Hodgman” and “Bubble”), are both parents who wanted “Sound Detectives” to be as layered as possible. In addition to investigating physics and acoustics, the podcast includes information on auditory biology (even most adults probably aren’t aware that the ears influence taste) and one episode that examines how deaf people experience sound as vibration.The two women, who wrote the scripts with Isabelle Redman Dolce, also decided that the dialogue would be partly improvised.“I like the energy that it brings, and the ideas that will sort of come forth that would probably never emerge in any other way,” Smith said. They sought actors with improv experience, and Vinny Thomas, who voices Detective Hunch, proved to be an authority on animal characteristics (like the fact that whale sharks lead solitary lives).“Hunch is kind of like an eccentric uncle,” Thomas said, “and what eccentric uncle isn’t a know-it-all?”Jessica McKenna, who portrays the ever-curious Audie, improvised song interludes as well as lines, using her skills to collaborate with the composer Adam Deibert on the jazzy “Sound Detectives” theme. “It’s a really goofy niche I’ve carved out for myself,” she said.In addition to being an ear, Audie personifies a child who is maybe “solving the case before the adult,” Sokolowski said.The creators of “Sound Detectives,” who have built a podcast website with related sleuthing activities, intend young listeners to become just as engaged as Audie in the season-long investigation.“One of the attractive exercises that we’re engaging in here is getting kids to listen critically to the world, right?” Burton said. “To use their powers of discernment, which is one of my favorite words.” More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Stories That Are Very Scary, and Real

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      Four terrifying, unnerving picks across television, film and podcast.It’s the time of year when I tend to push the boundaries of how many scary stories I can stomach. That includes horror movies, but also, true crime offerings that I may have skipped. Of course, with true crime, that self-soothing mantra of “at least it’s not real” doesn’t apply, which makes it all the more haunting. Here are four picks that shook me to my core.Documentary“Beware the Slenderman”On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wis., Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, then 12 years old, lured their friend and classmate Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times. Weier and Geyser were trying to appease the fictional character Slender Man, a tall, lanky, faceless ghoul and modern-day boogeyman whose image had been disseminated on the Creepypasta Wiki, a horror-centric online forum. The girls believed that if they killed their friend, they would save their families from Slender Man’s wrath and get to live forever in what they called Slender Mansion.This 2016 documentary, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, uses chilling footage of the girls recounting the precipitating events to police officers hours after the stabbing. And Brodsky spent 18 months with the parents of Weier and Geyser ahead of their trial on charges of attempted first-degree murder.Particularly hard to shake is how Slender Man captivated young people. The character originated from a Photoshop challenge to create convincing paranormal images, then spread to platforms across the web and became the basis of popular online games. In the documentary, mental health experts talk about the role of internet as companion; the abundance of grotesque imagery online; and what I found most disturbing: the concept that a meme with great spreadability is in fact a virus of the mind.Docuseries“John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise”The term “killer clown” would normally send me running for the hills. But I was curious about this 2021 six-episode Peacock docuseries, which is a comprehensive exploration of the crimes committed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on boys and men and was sentenced on 33 counts of homicide in 1980. Gacy, who had been a respected and well-connected figure in his Chicago community and who performed for children as Pogo the Clown, was executed at an Illinois prison in 1994.Along with interviews of investigators, a sister of Gacy’s and family members of victims — as well as film of the excavation of his home, under which dozens of bodies were buried — the series includes a great deal of previously unseen footage of a 1992 interview with Gacy by the F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler, who is credited with creating the term “serial killer.” (For “Mindhunter” fans, Ressler inspired the character of Special Agent Bill Tench.) Most indelible to me is how utterly ordinary and unremarkable Gacy seemed.While serial killers like him have often been too heavily glorified, there is value in not forgetting the systemic failures that allowed such horrors to continue unchecked. Much as they did with the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the police ignored warnings and pushed aside clues, including pleas from a victim who’d survived, because of entrenched homophobia.Podcast“Dr. Death”: Season 1I decided to binge this 10-episode series on a 12-hour road trip with my dogs. Not even one episode in, I had to pull over and get out of my car for some air. But I persevered, so don’t let that dissuade you.Season 1 of this Wondery podcast, reported and hosted by the science journalist Laura Beil, tells the story of Christopher Duntsch, a young neurosurgeon who arrived in Dallas in 2010 and charmed his patients with confidence and charisma. He claimed that he could cure back pain when nothing else worked. Under his care, which amounted to butchery, over 30 patients were severely injured; two died.As stomach-turning as these accounts are, revelations about how he slipped through the medical system are worse.“In the Dark”: Season 1In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on a dead-end country road in his small Minnesota town, a kidnapping that would fuel an already fast-growing national paranoia: that pedophiles were snatching up America’s children. The search that followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. Though the investigation was terribly mishandled — as the host Madeleine Baran, an investigative journalist, and a team of reporters make clear over nine episodes and two bonus episodes of this American Public Media podcast (it found a new home at The New Yorker earlier this year).For 27 years, there were no answers, but a couple of weeks before Season 1 was set to debut, in 2016, Wetterling’s remains were discovered, changing everything and taking a story from decades ago and placing it breathlessly in the present. More

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      in Music

      How the Agushto Papa Podcast Chronicles Musica Mexicana

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      The Agushto Papa podcast has become the go-to media outlet for the rising stars of música mexicana.When the four hosts of the Agushto Papa podcast — all Mexican Americans in their early to mid 20s — were teenagers, they wrestled with, as all young people do, the music of their parents’ generation. The varying styles that are termed, broadly, regional Mexican music, have remained emphatically traditional in presentation and sound for decades. For young men growing up very differently from their parents, listening to it was a complicated proposition.“In middle school, I was kind of scared to tell people that I would listen to it, because back then, it wasn’t cool,” said Diego Mondragon, one of the show’s founders. Angel Lopez, one of his co-hosts, echoed the sentiment: “I feel like there was a negative stigma toward it.”Much has changed in the last five years, however, thanks to an influx of new talent with wide-ranging musical references, gestures borrowed from hip-hop, and increased global attention on Spanish-language music thanks to the rise of streaming. As a result, Mexican music is evolving quickly and being heard more broadly than ever. This movement, broadly referred to as música mexicana, has minted a whole new generation of stars in short order: Peso Pluma, Natanael Cano, Grupo Frontera, Ivan Cornejo, Fuerza Regida, DannyLux, Yahritza y Su Esencia, Eslabon Armado, Junior H and more.Agushto Papa, which released its first episode on YouTube in March 2021, and has since amassed over 270,000 subscribers on the platform, has become the most reliable and visible chronicler of this wave — showcasing new releases, hosting intimate performances, reporting news about established stars and rookies alike, chit-chatting about gossip and keeping an eye on tensions that have been developing between some of the movement’s biggest names.“As first-generation immigrants, we always felt, like it or not, a little bit out of place or a little bit like we’re intruding into something,” Lopez, left, said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesFour months ago, the hosts — Lopez, 23; Mondragon, 23; Diego (Keko) Erazo, 24; and Jason Nuñez, 23 — each moved out of their respective families’ homes into a shared house in Stanton, Calif., after a long stretch filming the show largely in Nuñez’s family garage, in order to create a more focused environment for making their content. (Erazo, Mondragon and Nuñez grew up nearby, in Westminster, Calif., and played soccer together as children. They met Lopez in high school.)“As first-generation immigrants, we always felt, like it or not, a little bit out of place or a little bit like we’re intruding into something,” Lopez said. “And now, with the music, we heard people our age talking about issues that we have living here in the United States as Mexicans. So we really fell in love with that.” (For a time, Mondragon and Nuñez were in a band, Grupo Activo, managed by Erazo — the podcast’s title is from an inside joke from that era, riffing on the term “a gusto,” or relaxed.)Most of the show’s interview subjects are of a similar age and cultural background as the hosts, creating a built-in ease. “A lot of the new artists that are coming out, they’re Mexican American. They speak both Spanish and English,” Erazo said. Mondragon estimated that about 75 percent of the podcast’s interviews are conducted in English.Erazo added that the casualness of the setting contributes to the hosts’ ability to get unvarnished conversation from their subjects: “They needed somewhere where they could be themselves, be who they are, express their feelings, let it all out instead of going in and being like, ‘Yes sir, no sir.’” Many interviews are booked directly, over text or direct message, bypassing traditional intermediaries.Mondragon also emphasized that it’s not just the musicmakers who are changing, but the music as well, a far cry from what was on offer in his parents’ era. “Back then music was very strict with their rules. Like, ‘you need to dress like this, You need to sing like Vicente Fernández. You need to have this beautiful voice,’” he said. But the introduction of technology and techniques from other genres meant more stylistic entry points for artists.“I think a big reason why the younger generation fell in love with this music is you didn’t really have to have a singer’s voice to participate,” Nuñez said. “If you had like a regular monotone voice, you could still cultivate and create the new style of music.”As the scene has become more popular, there have been more internecine squabbles between artists — a primary one is between Peso Pluma and Jesus Ortiz Paz, the singer of Fuerza Regida — tensions that persist despite the fact that the genre’s rising tide is likely to lift all boats.The podcast’s casual setting is key to the hosts’ ability to get unvarnished conversation from their subjects.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“I think we just try to stay neutral and let the people decide,” Nuñez said. “Just give them the facts.” On the show, discussions about the artists’ barbs at each other are dissected with childlike awe and a layer of concern. (Occasionally the podcasters have tried to capitalize on the spats: They briefly sold “Make JOP and Peso Friends Again” shirts and hats.)Very quickly, the hosts themselves have become figures in the world they document. Occasionally, they’ll share videos which show them getting acknowledged at concerts by the artists they cover and admire. They have started a record label, which they hope to use to elevate new talent, and view the long-running radio and television personality Pepe Garza, and his interview and performance show “Pepe’s Office,” as a model for what Agushto Papa might develop into.There have been some hiccups in the crew’s quick ascent. Recently the show was demonetized by YouTube over a technical issue. And in a recent video, Lopez frankly discussed how the sudden success of the show had led to some disruptive life decisions, which prompted a group decision to stop drinking. “The whole honeymoon phase is over,” he said. When they began the podcast, Lopez said he had been happy just to receive invitations to artists’ parties. “But you’ve got to learn to say no and just to get to work.”Perhaps most crucially, though, not only have they fully reconciled their relationship with the music of their parents’ generation, but they’ve been able to convince their parents that the music of the current generation is valid, too.“A lot of older people were saying, ‘Oh, what is this? Turn it off. That’s not real Mexican music,’” Erazo said.Mondragon recalled his mother’s initial resistance to Cano, one of his favorite artists and a central figure in the movement’s increased visibility. “She would be like, ‘Why does he dress like that? Why does he talk like that? The tattoos are ugly,’” he recalled.She’s opened her mind, and her ears, though. “Now she understands that we need a Nata, we need a Peso — to put Mexico out there to the world, for us.” More

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      in Television

      The Best True Crime to Stream: Women Who Do Wrong

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      By and large, women and girls are the victims of violent crimes, not the perpetrators. But not always. Here are four picks across TV, film and podcast that turn the tables.If there’s one constant across the true crime genre, it’s that women and girls do not fare well. For those of us who follow it, there’s no avoiding or softening the horrific fates that often befall them. True crime, after all, is real life. And in the United States, men accounted for nearly 80 percent of arrests involving violent crimes in 2019, according to the F.B.I.; men also made up 88 percent of the arrests in instances of murder and non-negligent manslaughter that year.That said, there is a much smaller subset of true crime that is perhaps more gripping because it’s so rare: crimes perpetrated by women and even girls.Here are four picks you can watch or listen to:Television“Snapped”There are over 600 episodes across 32 seasons of this Oxygen series, which has been a true crime staple since its debut in 2004. Sure, “Snapped” has all the addictively cheesy trappings of bingeable, guilty-pleasure viewing — indulgent voice-over narration, abundant re-enactments. (The tagline? “From socialites to secretaries, female killers share one thing in common: They all snapped.”)But what this show delivers cannot be found anywhere else. Each episode explores a crime committed by a woman — crimes you probably would never have heard about otherwise, in part because they happen in America’s nooks and crannies. The stories are largely told through interviews with those involved, often including the criminals or victims themselves. And you get an entire story in about 45 minutes.While there are some re-emerging themes — namely, women who feel trapped in their lives — the crimes and motivations are expansive. Seasons 12 through 32 are streaming on Peacock, and new episodes and reruns are broadcast on Oxygen.DOCUSERIES“Evil Genius”The bizarre details of the crimes at the heart of this four-part 2018 Netflix series still linger in my mind: In 2003, Brian Wells, a pizza delivery guy, entered a small-town Pennsylvania bank wearing a collar bomb and carrying a cane fashioned into a shotgun. He produced a lengthy note demanding $250,000. Wells then failed to complete a complex scavenger hunt that presumably would have ended with a code or key to unlock the bomb affixed around his neck. News footage of him sitting on the street pleading with officers as the explosive ticks down is unforgettable. But this is just one layer of an onion that grows only more rotten.Directed by Barbara Schroeder and executive produced by Jay and Mark Duplass, “Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist” quickly turns its focus to Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the brilliant, terrifying, mentally unwell “evil genius” of the title. The life of Diehl-Armstrong, who had a string of dead boyfriends behind her, is explored in detail, uncovering a winding tale that never feels fully resolved.Documentary“I Love You, Now Die”Not long ago, this strange and sad story could have been the premise for a “Black Mirror” episode. Over thousands of text messages exchanged between two Massachusetts teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014, a tragedy unfolds that culminates in Roy’s suicide and Carter’s trial for her role in his death.In the two-part 2019 HBO documentary film “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter,” the director Erin Lee Carr does the difficult job of centering the teenagers’ mind-set. Carr fills the screen with the texts sent between them — complete with the dings and swooshes of messages coming and going. “Romeo and Juliet” is mentioned. “It’s okay to be scared and it’s normal,” reads a text from Carter to Roy. “I mean you’re about to die.”Their exchanges, combined with courtroom footage of Carter sitting quietly as the proceedings are underway, raise all of the necessary questions. I found myself spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology.Podcast“The Retrievals”Over about five months in 2020, as many as 200 women who had egg-retrieval procedures at the Yale Fertility Center in Connecticut were exposed to a medical nightmare. A nurse at the clinic was stealing untold amounts of the pain medication fentanyl, swapping the liquid in the vials with saline — which was administered to the patients instead. Some of the women cried out during their procedures; others complained of pain later, while some blamed themselves, saying they had doubted their own intuition. Almost all were dismissed by those in charge, often blamed for their own pain.“The Retrievals,” from Serial Productions and The New York Times, is reported by Susan Burton, who interviews a dozen of these patients, all of whom are grappling with what they endured. Prepare to be bewildered by how the clinic tried to brush off the ordeal as mostly harmless, underscoring how women’s accounts of their own bodies are so commonly disrespected and diminished. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream Now

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      Four picks across television, documentary and podcast that do a lot more than rehash what we already know about notorious killers.Decades before true crime crept in from the margins and inundated pop culture, I found a humble paperback buried in the stacks of my parents’ bookshelf about America’s most notorious serial killers. Perhaps inadvisable for a 10 year old, I read and reread about the horrors inflicted by, among others, Ed Gein, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. Though I was already aware that terrible things happened in general, this was different: specific, personal and intimately chilling.Lately, and fortunately, the tired approach of centering these monsters by rehashing their personal struggles and the details of their deeds has been falling out of favor. Interest has shifted instead to elevating the stories of those impacted and to understanding the mood of the eras and the societal circumstances in which these crimes took place. This shift was reflected to some degree in July when a man was arrested in the Gilgo Beach serial killings. Profiles of the suspect abounded, but from the start, there was demand for information about the victims as well as scrutiny of the investigation.This is the first in a series of streaming lists about true crime films, shows and podcasts. And while I won’t dwell on these types of murderers in this in the future, the topic does feel like the appropriate place to start. Here are picks across television, documentary and podcast that offer more than the usual glorification of madness.Documentary Mini-Series“Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York”No series in recent memory has so successfully, thoughtfully and deliberately contextualized a serial killing spree like this four-part Max series, based on a book by Elon Green. In the early 1990s, amid the AIDS crisis and rising hate crimes against L.G.B.T.Q. people, gay men were being stalked in Manhattan piano bars — murdered and dismembered, their bodies found discarded around New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But the killer’s identity, almost remarkably, is not front of mind as the episodes proceed.Instead, through interviews with family members, friends, lovers, and members and allies of the queer community, the victims are powerfully, heartbreakingly humanized, while viewers are plunged into the New York City of the time. Instead of simply alluding to the problems of bias and bigotry by those entrusted to solve these crimes, this series boldly addresses the ways in which the New York Police Department and the city’s politicians treated the murdered men, the community as a whole and those pleading for action as second-class citizens. The final episode aired on Sunday.“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer”This four-part Netflix series about the search for Richard Ramirez, who terrorized California with a brutal and unpredictable rampage that lasted just over a year in the mid-1980s, is about much more than who he was and what he did. It’s instead anchored in the recollections of survivors, victims’ families, journalists who worked on the case, and primarily Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, detectives who devoted themselves tirelessly to hunting for Ramirez.While this series, from 2021, doesn’t minimize the horrors of the crimes (be warned, there is crime-scene footage), it, like “Last Call,” conveys an uncanny sense of time and place, highlighting the mentality of the day in the communities affected and the shortcomings of the available technology. Be prepared to be stunned by mistakes made by law enforcement and by political leaders who jeopardized the frantic search.Podcast“This Is Actually Happening,” Episode 259:“What If You Survived a Serial Killer?”I have listened to dozens of episodes of this podcast, in which regular people simply tell the stories of staggering, often wrenching, events that have altered the course of their lives. It epitomizes my favorite format across true crime: stripped-down, no-frills first-person accounts that leave space for the gravity of the story to hit hard. And the stories explored on “This Is Actually Happening” run the gamut, which means there’s a good chance it will make another appearance on this list.This 2022 episode features Jane Boroski, the only known survivor of the Connecticut River Valley killer, whose identity is still unknown. He murdered at least seven women over a decade starting in the late 1970s, but in this podcast, the details of his crimes are put to the side in favor of giving Boroski — who was attacked when she was 22 years old and seven months pregnant, after she’d stopped for a soda on the way home from a county fair — room to discuss who she was before, during and after the attack, and who she is now.Also, thoughtfully, this podcast includes highly specific warnings in the show notes of each episode page to ensure that listeners are aware of what sensitive topics will be discussed.Television“Mindhunter”This gripping and moody Netflix drama — executive-produced by its creator, Joe Penhall, along with David Fincher and Charlize Theron — sadly won’t see a third season, Fincher confirmed this year, but the first two are more than worth the price of admission (that being a slice of your sense of security). Based on the memoir “Mindhunter: Inside the F.B.I.’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” the show dramatizes the creation of the F.B.I.’s real Behavioral Science Unit, where the concept of a serial killer began. And while the central trio of characters — Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), an F.B.I. hostage negotiator increasingly unsettled by the emergence of a disturbing theme; the behavioral-science specialist Bill Tench (Holt McCallany); and the psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) — are fictional, the serial killers that appear are all based on real people, with casting that is eerily true to life.It starts in 1977, with David Berkowitz (Oliver Cooper), who was known as the “Son of Sam,” and moves on to, among others, Ed Kemper, the “Coed Killer” (Cameron Britton, who won an Emmy for the role) and Dennis “B.T.K.” Rader (Sonny Valicenti, still only listed as an A.D.T. serviceman in the credits). The genius of “Mindhunter,” though, is that it’s — as The Times’s TV critic James Poniewozik put it when the first season was released in 2017 — “more academic than sensationalistic,” with the stomach-turning events rarely spelled out in blood, but instead explored through hushed conversations. More

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      in Television

      ‘Minx’ and ‘Stiffed’: Dirty Pictures From a Revolution

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      Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.HBO MaxCultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.Lovibond of “Minx” says a show set in the 1970s like hers shouldn’t still resonate, but it does.HBO Max“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall. More

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      ‘Based on a True Story’: The Vogue of Killer Content

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      A new Peacock satire puts the ethics of America’s true-crime obsession on trial by making a serial killer more than just a subject. He’s also the star.In a September 2022 episode of “You’re Wrong About,” a history podcast, the writer Michael Hobbes noted that the number of serial killers might be diminishing, which could be a problem, he said — for true-crime fanatics, anyway.“Step it up out there, serial killers,” he said. “You got to produce good content.”Hobbes was joking, but serial killers and the podcasts devoted to them feed an ever growing true-crime industry worth millions of dollars. Now the eight-episode Peacock satire “Based on a True Story,” which arrived in full last week, poses a troubling question: What if serial killers weren’t only the subjects but also the hosts, or even the producers, of a true-crime podcast?The idea isn’t entirely far-fetched. The true-crime world is saturated with podcasts that have been criticized as being ethically compromised and flawed, accused of offenses including plagiarism, racial insensitivity and pro-police bias. True-crime TV series have likewise been criticized: the docu-series “The Jinx,” for edits of a killer’s confession; “Making a Murderer,” for its presentation and omission of details; and the scripted drama “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” for humanizing its subject at the expense of Dahmer’s victims.“Based on a True Story,” created by Craig Rosenberg (“The Boys”), is a dark, comic sendup of true crime and its conventions, clichés and moral compromises. Matt (played by Tom Bateman) is a friendly plumber by day and the feared West Side Ripper by night. When a married couple in desperate need of excitement and cash (the pregnant Ava, played by an also-pregnant Kaley Cuoco, and Nathan, played by Chris Messina) discover his identity, they blackmail him into embarking on a scheme to create a podcast from the killer’s point-of-view.“Finally, some good luck!” Ava says. “A serial killer has fallen into our laps.”One central challenge, however, was how — and whether — the creators and cast of “Based on a True Story” could avoid committing the same crimes as the genre it claims to critique. It is, after all, still a comedy about some particularly gruesome murders.For Cuoco and Messina, it was important to keep the actions of their own characters in proper perspective.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” Chris Messina (with Kaley Cuoco) said about trying to nail the tone of the satire.Peacock“In my opinion, Ava and Nathan are just as bad as the killer,” Cuoco, who is also an executive producer, said in a recent phone interview. “I know Ava is trying to believe, Well, this is us stopping him. It’s wrong and it’s funny at the same time.”Messina said, in a separate interview, that figuring out the tone had been a persistent struggle.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” he said. “Obviously, with people being murdered, it’s no laughing matter. But there is a screwball comedy and terror along with a big heart.“Like, in the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo,’ when they are putting someone in a woodchipper. Why am I laughing one minute and horrified the next?”As the story gets underway, the absurdities quickly mount. In the beginning, Matt is supposed to be merely the interview subject, his voice disguised. But as the plot progresses, he emerges as a de facto showrunner.He upgrades the locations and equipment. He provides a new edit, changing the beginning, the ending and the music. He rejects every note about the narrative and the brand.“These seem like completely ridiculous conversations given that you are talking about people who have been murdered,” Bateman said. “And the funny thing is, he’s getting more and more artistically involved because it’s the first time in his life he’s ever felt seen.”Michael Costigan, an executive producer, said he thought the podcasters’ artistic squabbles also spoke to a common error in the true-crime world: losing track of the reality of the crimes.“Kaley’s character is pitching her ideas and forgetting something: ‘I’m sitting across from the perpetrator,’” he said. “We thought, This is absolutely talking about a metaphor for how millions of people get lost in stories as escapism. But what are they escaping into? What are they forgetting about?”Jason Bateman, another executive producer (no relation to Tom), said he had thought a lot about the show’s tone, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too “silly” or “camp,” grounding character actions in reality. It was, he acknowledged, a difficult line to walk.Partly as a mirror of their own internal debates, the writers and producers created a character, played by Ever Carradine, who is the mother of a West Side Ripper victim. Her participation in a true-crime panel raises questions of whether she is honoring or exploiting her daughter.The show takes Nathan and Ava (Messina and Cuoco) to a true-crime convention, where all sorts of horrific crimes and killers are monetized. Elizabeth Morris/Peacock“We wondered in those scenes, what is the line?” Costigan said. “This is her wanting to talk about her daughter but then also participating in this world, too. We’re really hoping that the audience can have their cake and eat it, too — that you see the duality, see the world from both lenses.”Critics have pointed to recent studies in suggesting that fans of the genre, a large percentage of whom are women, can suffer from a kind of true-crime brain, a sense of heightened fear that is out-of-sync with the overall decline in violent crime of recent decades. It has also, as the advent of the web sleuth attests, created a lot of self-appointed experts. Ava’s wine-and-crime club of true-crime obsessives are fans of a podcast called “Sisters in Crime,” which leads her to believe she has mastered the genre.“Ava says things like ‘DB’ for dead body,” said Cuoco, who admitted that she is a huge “Dateline” fan. “She talks like she’s actually on one of those shows.”The same delusion that allows Cuoco’s Ava to figure out that Matt is the West Side Ripper also, unfortunately, leads her to believe she can control a serial killer — and to lose sight of the victims. In the original script, Ava and Nathan were to be the parents of teenagers, but when Cuoco became pregnant, she suggested that Ava be pregnant as well. It helped raise the stakes and address why Ava would be so blinded by her need to make money.“Her life is chaotic,” Cuoco said. “This is a distraction.”To find a potential fan base, the characters take an exploratory trip to CrimeCon, a series of real-life conventions for true crime aficionados, held in cities like Las Vegas, New Orleans and Orlando. As the actors and other producers explained, Rosenberg, himself a true-crime fan, had started thinking more about how criminals become celebrities after attending one such event. (A Peacock spokesman said Rosenberg was unavailable to comment because of the continuing writers’ strike.)“Craig said he heard people there discussing who their favorite serial killers were, as if they were football players,” Tom Bateman said. His character, walking around the convention floor, observes merchandise being sold in his name, as it is for other serial killers. But he isn’t ranking as highly as he thinks he should be.Cuoco said she had enjoyed making a humorous examination of the genre. But there were some sobering issues about true-crime, she acknowledged, that even this satire couldn’t fully address — including the future of the genre, which she said was “already at an extreme.”“There is a fine line,” she added. “I do not condone a serial killer doing a podcast in real life. But I feel like I would be one of those people who say, ‘This should be illegal,’ and then probably go in my car and listen to it. We can’t help ourselves.” More