by Keisya Cleine
What are we doing, really, when we press play on a stranger’s trauma?
The most reasonable reason for watching true crime is because we don’t want the same thing to happen to us. And what better way to learn than through experience, albeit someone else’s? But there’s really only so much real-life violence, sociopathic back stabbings, and what are the odds of my best friend being a psycho and killing me tonight thoughts for it to be enough, too much. So why do people binge watch true crime documentaries?
Many, perhaps subconsciously, watch for the plot. The suspense. The odd satisfaction that comes from a case being solved or, better yet, unsolved. But beneath the reenactments and overdramatic scores is something older than Netflix, film, or America itself: catharsis – a structure of Greek tragedy.
You could pick any tragic figure from ancient Greek myth – Oedipus, sure, but also Pentheus, Antigone, Iphigenia – and you’d find the same blueprint: people caught in stories too big for them and punished for seeing too clearly or not soon enough. They try to act, stop the spiral, they’re told they have choices but their choices are rigged at best. Pentheus is a good example. A guy obsessed with exposing a cult and thinks he’s got the whole thing figured out. His blind spot? Stubbornness. A fatal flaw which gets him ripped apart (literally) by the very people he wanted to control. A classic tragic ending.
It’s not always grand. In true crime, the protagonists aren’t kings or presidents. Sometimes they’re a cashier in Wisconsin. A mother who trusted the wrong man. A wrongfully convicted teenager. But the arc remains: normal people, extraordinary harm, an ending no one wanted and everyone saw coming.
A Greek tragedy was a communal and public experience where Athenian citizens gathered, but they weren’t there expecting to be entertained, but to grieve together or, at the very least, deeply think. Aristotle put a name to it: catharsis – the purging of pity and fear. You watch someone suffer terribly, sometimes for reasons not entirely their fault, and because of that, you leave the theatre scraped raw but with humanity clarified. It was collective and in a way necessary, for a time when death and killing your own brother was a simple matter of reserving dignity.
But what happens when you take that same emotional engine and mass produce it for streaming?
The modern true crime doc has its own rhythm. An ordinary day, a disturbing twist, a detail being slowly uncovered as episodes autoplay one after another – confessions, trials, maybe an exoneration or maybe just another question mark.
Structurally, it’s a perfect tragedy. Except for leaving you wrung out and clean, it leaves you on edge. Catharsis replaced by compulsion.
And unlike Sophocles, Netflix doesn’t cut away. Greek tragedy kept its horrors just offstage. The audience was told that Jocasta hung herself and that Pentheus was torn apart by his own mother and the frenzied cultists, but they didn’t watch it happen. The imagination did the heavy lifting and the chorus buffered the shock.
Now the camera zooms in: crime scene photos, voicemails, 911-call screams, a second-too-long linger on grieving parents. There’s no filter, no distance, just intimacy with pain we have no business being intimate with. It’s someone’s actual worst day, packaged for autoplay.
Of course, some documentaries are trying to do something more. For example, The Central Park Five (2012) and Netflix’s adaptation of the same story, When They See Us (2019), dig into how racism toward African Americans and a flawed justice system conspired to wrongfully convict five innocent teenagers. They expose the media frenzy, the rush to judgment, how the institution failed so bad that defenseless young lives were destroyed. The Thin Blue Line (1988) went even further – it reopened a case that had been closed for years, eventually freeing a man wrongfully sentenced to death. But for each of these reform-oriented productions, there are a dozen that exist only to disturb you just enough to keep watching with no deeper reckoning, let alone a call to action.
True crime thrives on helplessness. We know more than the people on screen and we know what’s coming, yet there’s nothing we can do. We can only observe, dissect, maybe speculate through the hindsight that we’re granted – interview clips edited into just the right moment, further post-production research – but still, we’re denied the one vital thing: intervention. That’s not catharsis. That’s doom scrolling with better production values.
What does it mean that we’ve turned other people’s traumas into background noise? That some people even go as far as to rank real murder cases on social media by shock values?
There’s no easy answer. True crime can raise awareness and it can drive policy, correct injustice, restore some dignity, or what’s left of it, to the dead. But it can also strip people down to plot points and reward us for watching more, not understanding better. So perhaps the question isn’t whether we should watch, but whether we can do so ethically with attention, humility, and an awareness that we are spectators of someone else’s irreversible loss.
Not every tragedy needs a sequel, and maybe that’s the difference between Pentheus and modern true crime. We shouldn’t need a season two to remember someone died at the bottom of one.
Keisya Cleine can be found on Instagram @keisyacleine, and is currently the editor-in-chief of Culterate, an art and literature magazine.
