A Psychiatrist Explains What Your True Crime Obsession REALLY Says About You

What is up with this true crime obsession? From podcasts (this is all your fault, Serial), to Netflix binges (looking at you Making a Murderer), to real life events in drama form (The People v. O.J. Simpson), to real life events in documentary form (30 for 30: O.J. Made in America), to made up dramas that feel awfully real (The Night Of), true crime stories are having a moment.
They have captured everyone’s attention the way no other genre has since reality TV came to be about 20 years ago. It’s all anyone wants to discuss or solve or share theories about. But why? Where does this fascination with the genre come from, and what does it say about us? About our personalities? Are we secretly murderers in the making?
We spoke to Dr. Sharon Packer, a psychiatrist in private practice and an Asst. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, for her insight as to why people are so undeniably hooked on the true crime genre. Even she admits that many of her fellow doctor friends are buzzing about The Night Of lately!

For starters, Dr. Packer points to schadenfreude. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, she explains: “It’s basically a fancy German word that was used by Freud and the psychoanalysts back when they spoke German, about people getting pleasure in other people’s problems and other people’s suffering. And really, it’s vicarious. It’s not necessarily sadistic, but if bad faith had to fall on someone, at least it fell on someone else. Whatever the luck of the draw is, at least someone else got the short straw. So there’s a sense of relief in finding out that it happened to someone else rather than you.”

She goes on to say, “There’s something else that’s a little bit darker, that a lot of people don’t want to accept, but there’s this sense of relief that it wasn’t you who did it. We all get angry at people, and many people say ‘I could kill them’ but almost no one does that, thankfully. But then when you see it on screen, you say, ‘Oh someone had to kill someone, it wasn’t me, thank God.’ And so there’s once again that same sense of relief that whatever kinds of aggression and impulses one has, we didn’t act on them, someone else did.”
Ok, but true crime stories are scary! They are brutal and violent and nerve-wracking; why would people ever want to put themselves through that, and risk having nightmares or anxiety about these situations? Basically, why would people ever want to feel scared? “Part of it is that sense of relief,” Dr. Packer explains. “But not everyone wants to be scared. I have patients who love horror films and they say they know what’s going to happen, so they don’t get scared. It’s almost like rehearsing something that they know is going to happen but it doesn’t, so they feel in control.”

Is it possible that watching true crime shows is similar to horror movies, in that we also view them as a rehearsal of sorts? So that if we were ever to find ourselves or a loved one involved in a crime, we would know what to expect? “It could be like a dress rehearsal. Like the old fashioned fire drills or air raid drills, they had to keep practicing in case a devastating event happened, and they expected it to happen. I think there’s a certain degree for that.”
Dr. Packer also went on to explain the differences between film noir and true crime, saying, “In film noir, everything goes on behind closed doors or behind venetian blinds, in the shadows. Things are covered, they’re covert and they’re concealed. Whereas true crime is just the opposite, they’re right up front, not only can you see what’s happening, but it actually did happen.”
So maybe the murder part isn’t even what people are attracted to, or what they find to be the most interesting part about the true crime stories. Perhaps it’s what comes after. Are people more obsessed with what goes down in the courtroom and the justice or injustice that is served there? “Courtroom drama is a big part, people like that. Although attorneys tell me that what happens in fictionalized courtroom dramas is not very accurate. There’s something called the CSI effect, that their clients expect everything to be solved like CSI. They said that you can almost never get fingerprints from a gun, that partial fingerprints aren’t admissible in court, and they usually get partial finger prints. So, people have this expectation that the defense attorney is going to do as well as CSI people, so the attorneys fall short. Then if the prosecutor can’t do what they do on CSI, then the prosecutor is not as good in the eyes of the victim’s family. But a courtroom drama is a drama. People are wearing costumes, you know, judge’s robes, and there’s a setting, there is a drama.”

And it’s not only the courtroom procedurals that people turn to. There’s another genre that people can’t get enough of, for similar reasons to true crime stores. “Superheroes are true crime, but they are fictionalized. They can fly, they can turn into ants and become elastic. It seems realistic, but it’s not, and that’s a genre that has really flourished since 9/11.”
There is also one more force at hand here, that certainly plays a role in our true crime obsession, one that we weren’t always exposed to, and that is the role of social media and a 24/7 news cycle. “You’re holding your iPhone and getting these pop ups all day long about breaking news, and the breaking news is always bad news, so we’re used to that and we expect it. Social media has brought us so close and in such intimate and immediate contact, it’s hard to step back to these fictionalized accounts. There is some excess blurring of reality and fantasy and things that we thought couldn’t possibly be true, are turning out to be true.
Bottom line, Dr. Packer says, “People get relief from knowing that they are not the ones that lost control of their impulses. And I think that’s a tremendous appeal.” So next time you sit down to watch Making a Murderer, know that the show is not actually making you a murderer, it’s simply making you feel quite relieved that you’re NOT one.