The Stories You Are About to See Are True: Investigating Our Obsession with True Crime

“The public is drawn to true crime because it triggers the most basic and powerful emotion in all of us – fear,” criminology professor Scott Bonn wrote in 2016. With the success of such podcasts as Crimetown and Serial, plus documentaries like The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, The Keepers, Mommy Dead and Dearest, Making a Murderer, O.J.: Made in America and the anthology series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, there’s no denying audiences’ appetite for true-crime content. And, coming soon, from Academy Award nominee Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost): the two-part docuseries Cold Blooded: The Clutter Family Murders, about the 1959 murder of four members of the Clutter family, which would later be chronicled in Truman Capote’s seminal book In Cold Blood. The Paley Center assembles a stellar panel of true-crime content producers from across multiple platforms—film, television, podcasts—to explore the fascination, not just among audiences, but also the producers themselves. They will discuss their own motives plus challenges they faced in balancing the sensational appeal of true crime with deeper, more substantial issues, such as racial divisions and the criminal justice system.

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Events and participants are subject to change.