"I think I'm running out of True Crime shows," I said at the dinner table the other night.
"Sure looked like it," my husband said.
Earlier, as I was prepping the coconut shrimp and pineapple rice, I'd searched Netflix for something soothing to enjoy. You know, a crime show. But Netflix was just showing me one after another that I'd already seen. So I'd gone with Bikram, the story of the yoga guru who took America by storm and—shocker—turned out to be a sexual predator and a con man.
It wasn't a bad documentary, but it was a little already done. If you're a True Crime fan, which I would wager you are since you're reading my stuff, you understand what I mean.
I could go into my theory on why I think so many people like me turn to the macabre to decompress after a long day, but I think the obsession has already been pretty excellently explored in the HBO miniseries I'll Be Gone in the Dark.
And I could wax philosophical about how serial killers, who I'm obviously fascinated with and have been for most of my life, rose to prominence for a very good reason during the civil rights movements for racial and gender equality... but that cultural subtext is laid out pretty plainly in Skip Hollandsworth's The Midnight Assassin and John E. Douglas's Mindhunter, among a slew of other books.
Anyway, I was stuck watching Bikram while I made dinner. I gotta say, the smell of raw shrimp didn't exactly complement the visuals of a bunch of mostly naked people doing sweaty yoga.
I think I got into true crime in my preteens. Let's blame all those Goosebumps books for it, but I honestly don't know what sparked it. All I know is that whenever I caught a snippet of 20/20 or Dateline while I station surfed (we didn't have the channel with the schedule of shows back then; we still had to refer to the newspaper for a listing), I would stop immediately if I saw anything relating to a missing person or a brutal murder. Unsolved Mysteries and Rescue 911 were also go-tos.
I'm sure the pop of moral superiority was part of the appeal at first. "I would never get myself murdered like that," or "What an evil person! Lock him up and throw away the key!" Those sentiments feel great, especially when you're in the throes of puberty and very little makes sense anymore.
But then you get older and realize things are complicated, and not only is that okay, it's actually more interesting! Woohoo! And so a True Crime girl became a True Crime woman.
Like I said, though, I'm running out of options. I'm sure there are more amazing documentaries and books that I haven't found yet, but I don't know what they are.
So: If you have a recommendation, a True Crime book or show that I absolutely must watch, I beg of you: leave a comment and tell me! If I haven't seen it, I'll be in your debt, and if I have seen it, we can geek out about it together.