Get the latest gossip
True Crime’s ACAB Playbook Is Falling Into Place
A new crop of docuseries turns the typical explanation for law-enforcement failure on its head.
What’s striking about American Nightmare, though, is not that it finds a cop it can call heroic, but that Carausu is a lone voice against a tidal wave of her colleagues’ disinterest, bias, incompetence, and lack of professionalism. Unlike the default mode of true-crime docuseries from the past several years — and decades of ongoing linear shows like Cops and The First 48 before them — American Nightmare is uninterested in presenting investigators as well-intentioned hard workers stumped by a mastermind. This is visible in recent Netflix series like Night Stalker: Hunt for a Killer and Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, but it’s even more widely codified in the early true-crime formats of network TV and basic cable.
Or read this on VULTURE