Journalists and scholars alike have announced the genre’s elevation from tabloid fodder to public enlightenment. Prestige programs that reconsider past cases (Serial, 2014), call for wrongful convictions to be overturned (Making a Murderer, 2015), or are instrumental in bringing cases to trial (The Jinx, 2015) have been called “the new true crime”: a socially-minded and formally reflexive nonfiction genre that exposes established legal truths as scapegoating fictions.{1} If it exploits or sensationalizes human misery, the new true crime does so in service of justice, achieving, one critic claims, a sort of “trash balance... with only one bad ending instead of two.”{2}

To launder its tawdry reputation, this new, justice-driven true crime borrows directly from the stylings of documentary, understood conventionally as a vehicle for social justice and humanitarian advocacy. The true crime of previous eras—the Victorian-era “penny dreadful,” the tabloid, the dystopian crime novel—spoke to audiences in the titillating language of perverse criminality and intrepid police work. Today’s true crime titillates with the promise of justice.“We are trying everything possible to not feel exploitative or, you know, the Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing or ‘Let’s get ratings off of the death of somebody,’” says Serial’s executive producer Julie Snyder.{3} The criminal justice system did not “work” for the Central Park Five, just as it “failed” Adnan Syed. The proof is in the pudding, says The Jinx: while poor men and women of color are locked up despite a dearth of evidence, scions of the white, wealthy billionaire class walk free.