Every time a TV show dramatizes a grisly true crime story, it faces a dilemma. Is it possible to retell a tragedy without exploiting the victims and their families? Not only that, but can you recreate these deaths without sensationalizing, or even glorifying, the killer responsible?
These questions have created a genre that’s at war with itself, one that’s aware of both its ethical dubiousness and the fact that viewers will gobble it up to sate their true crime fascination. This October has offered up two shows that take extremely different approaches to solving this quandary: Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story and Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.
Who was Ed Gein? The new Netflix ‘Monster’ was the inspiration for ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’
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