‘Dahmer,’ ‘Murdaugh’ And ‘Murder’: Emmy Documentary Contenders On A Crime Spree With A Focus On Mischief And Mayhem

deadline.com:

Gruesome tales of grisly murder. Horror stories of kids in cults. False confessions and authentic admissions. True crime has taken over the documentary space, proving a reliable audience attractor for streaming platforms, network and cable channels.

While it’s the most popular genre within nonfiction programming broadly speaking, whether that will translate to success with Emmy voters remains an open question.

One thing’s for certain: there’s no lack of contenders — twisted tales dripping with blood. Netflix leads the way with multiple suitors, among them Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes, the grim story of one of America’s most notorious serial killers, built largely around recorded interviews between Dahmer and one of his young defense attorneys in the early 1990s.

It’s directed and executive produced by Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger, one of the leading figures in documentary. “As a storyteller, I thought the tapes provided incredible insight into Dahmer and this unique characteristic of him actually being very forthright,” Berlinger notes, contrasting Dahmer’s open admission of his lurid crimes to the obfuscation of serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, subjects of earlier Berlinger docuseries for Netflix. “Both of those serial killers [Gacy and Bundy] were very unreliable narrators.