How British True Crime Producers Are Quietly Revolutionizing Duty Of Care Amid Explosion In Genre’s Popularity

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: It was more than a year ago that a 45-year-old British woman, Nicola Bulley, went missing walking her dog in the sleepy northern English town of St Michael’s on Wyre.

What followed was three weeks of frenzy, one of the country’s most publicized, televised searches for a missing person in recent years that ended in tragedy when Bulley’s body was discovered on February 19.

A few months later, a coroner determined that Bulley’s death was due to accidental drowning. For Kate Beal, CEO of Confessions of a Psycho Killer indie Woodcut Media and founder of the UK’s nascent Association of True Crime Producers (ATCP), who was a similar age to Bulley and is also a mother, that three-week period and the media scrum that accompanied it did not sit comfortably, and she set about mulling over how the true crime TV community could ensure there was not a repeat. “You had production companies approaching the scene and even worse was the discourse on Twitter (now X) and general interest from the public,” says Beal. “It felt like it completely lacked subtlety.

High-profile criminologists and divers were reporting from the scene. In the UK, news is regulated and has standards and it felt like we’d gone beyond that and beyond our moral jurisdiction, and that this might be because of the prominence of true programing.” As the high-profile fallout from Netflix smash Baby Reindeer poses fresh questions about ethics in TV, Deadline has spoken with execs and those at the coalface of true crime production to slowly build a picture of the considerations around making a true crime show in the social media age, and the level of care that is being taken. “Our Jeremy Kyle moment” It was Bulley’s death, Beal says, along with the tragic