The True Story of True Crime’s Unscripted-to-Scripted Evolution and the Genre’s Seemingly Endless Appeal
variety.comJennifer Maas TV Business WriterThis year marks the 30th anniversary of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Brother’s Keeper,” which, as Berlinger says, is “one of the granddaddies of the true-crime docu movement.”It’s true that the 1992 film about the bizarre murder trial of Delbert Ward, who was accused of the “mercy killing” of his brother in rural upstate New York, was an early entrant in our collective societal obsession with the unscripted true-crime format, which in recent years has crossed over to the scripted side.As one of the founding fathers of the format that has piqued our interest in true crime to the point where limited series including “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” “The Staircase,” “The Dropout,” “Inventing Anna,” “Dr.
Death,” “A Very British Scandal,” and several more are all competing in the same Emmys’ cycle, Berlinger has some unique insight into the nonfiction-to-dramatized evolution. “I can think of no other storytelling technique where there is perfect dramatic structure,” Berlinger, who most recently produced Netflix’s docuseries “Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes,” says. “There’s rising and falling action.
There’s a clear beginning, middle and end. There are two parties vying for the truth. There’s an inciting incident and there’s a resolution.
There’s just a natural dramatic structure.“So if you want to create unscripted content that feels like a movie that has dramatic structure to it, that’s true crime,” he adds. “And I think that scripted filmmakers have discovered that as well.
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