"This weird logic is openly acknowledged in the first episode of
My Favorite Murder, the Gen-X and Millennial answer to True Detective. With hosts Karen Kilgariff, a stand-up comedian, and Georgia Hardstark, a cooking show personality, it launched in 2016 with the women saying, 'Let’s get cozy and comfy and…talk about murder!' Girlfriends huddling around a campfire sharing scary stories, they take violence to be inevitable. 'Tell me everything so I can avoid it!' says Hardstark in that first episode. Kilgariff replies, 'I just want to collect information and hear theories and stories so I can be braced, so that…I’m ready.' She goes on: 'It’s the law of physics…the more you know about something, the less likely it will happen to you.' That’s more fantasy than physics, but this program too has been downloaded millions of times. The hosts’ motto and title of their 2019 joint memoir is
Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered. It’s a joke, but it’s not a joke."
That's an isolated snippet of "Murder Is My Business/In the true crime genre’s latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence" by Caroline Fraser (NY Review of Books).
Lots more in that article, including a recommendation of the book "True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969."
Here's the website for "My Favorite Murder."
I've mostly stayed away from the true-crime genre myself. I listened to "Serial" but ultimately disapproved of it. I listened to "Dirty John" around the same time. But I've avoided all that since then. I don't want those things in my head. I don't even want to watch movies with murders anymore. There's something very strange about the way we humans entertain ourselves with murder, and I am not buying the homeopathy theory!
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2 comments:
Joe writes:
"'It’s the law of physics…the more you know about something, the less likely it will happen to you.'
"This reminds me of an old comedian talking about bombs on airplanes. Since one bomb on an airplane is really rare, if you bring your own bomb on an airplane that would be rarer still : )"
Matt in NC writes:
"True crime podcasts, and the idea that "the more you know about something, the less likely it will happen to you," am I the only one reminded of Bill Murray in What About Bob?
""If I fake it, then I don't have it."
https://youtu.be/RfrueeBmfXo
"(The key moment starts at 1:34.)"
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