Series on Serial Killers Conclusion: The Real Reason So Many of the Shows Are So Popular

At the end of the day, the best TV series took away the right lessons from serial killers – that usually the only interesting thing about them is the body count. For series like Homicide,  the only real difference between a drug war that racks up more bodies than a man who tortures and murders young boys is that one will traditionally get more overtime and attention than the other -  a lesson that David Simon took to heart in The Wire. On The X-Files, Mulder and Scully traditionally investigating supernatural serial killers and found them more interesting than the traditional once – and honestly less disturbing. Standing over the body of the victim in ‘Unruhe’, Scully admonishes Mulder for caring so much about the supernatural aspect. When he says he just wants to understand, Scully says: “I don’t want to understand. Alien conspiracies are very complicated, but murder is simple. Dexter was at its best when it tried to find the humanity behind the monsters – and failed when it tried to make the monsters Dexter chased more interesting than being human.

That is not the lesson that any other procedural has taken away. The media is fundamentally more fascinated by serial killers than actual serial killers.  Which in a sick way makes sense.  Trying to figure out the systemic causes of crime that lead so many stranger murders is very complicated. But a lone man, picking off the weak and innocent? That’s a simple, basic narrative.  For all the flaws in the last season of The Wire, Simon’s message did make that very clear – and given how the media reacts to these kind of killings, it’s hard to blame them.

At some point, however, trying to learn what makes a monster who or what they are will give too much credit to the monsters themselves. And far more importantly, it tries to humanize them and takes away the attention from the victims. That is why I was frankly rather shocked at Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series on Jeffrey Dahmer, because just four years earlier he and his colleagues had done a much more masterful job of illustrating a serial killer on the second installment of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.   In his portrayal of Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss was remarkable in portraying  a person who had pieces missing. But far more importantly was that the series spent as much time, if not more so, dealing with the stories of his victims.  I don’t just mean the parallels between Versace and Cunanan, when it came to how they were viewed being gay; it was the way that story was told in reverse chronology, showing how Cunanan was allowed to get away with as many murders as he did because of the layer of secrecy and indifference law enforcement and the victim’s families refused to either investigate the murders of homosexual men or even admit they might have been killed just for their lifestyles. Versace’s death is revealed to be a tragedy because there were any number of times – including after the very first murder – that Cunanan could have been caught and indeed should have been. The story of Gianni Versace is a story of shame. Dahmer, from what I understand, is just about another monster.

And maybe that’s the real reason the serial killer trope has so much popularity. Because what is a serial killer at the end of the day but a monster in human form?  Maybe all this time we have wrongly classifying the serial killer trope as something that fits under the level of the procedural but rather that of the horror movie. What are Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers but serial killers who can not be stopped no matter how hard you try? Isn’t that the real reason that so many critics have classified The Silence of the Lambs not as suspense or mystery but horror. What is Hannibal Lecter but a more cultured version of so many of these monsters,  locked away in a special cage because he is above mere mortals? Roger Ebert once defined a vampire as a cannibal with table manners. Isn’t that the real reason we find Lecter so interesting? Because he’s essentially Dracula who can walk around in broad daylight?

I think that’s the real reason so many series pursue the serial killer trope, why shows like Law and Order: SVU has lasted more than twenty years, why Criminal Minds is being revived, why Mindhunter is one of the most popular shows on Netflix? The people who track these monsters who walk among us catch or kill these Jasons and Freddies who we pass on the street every day without thinking, who offer a definite and final end to the monsters who are constantly being brought back for sequel after sequel, reboot after reboot, unrelenting, merciless and with no way to stop them in sight.

Perhaps this is the reason why I am fundamentally repulsed by these series for the same reason I hate so many horror films: the victims of these monsters are little more than cannon fodder, dolls, red shirts. Their lives mean nothing more to the people investigating their murders than the people who commit them. And all these series that come around telling these stories are that. You commit dozens of murders you might get a television show or a movie about you. But if you fall to one of these killers, unless your famous you’re a footnote. And even if you are, it’s only because of who killed you.

Now I imagine there are some who will make the argument that in the age of the antihero, the difference between a monstrous killer and an Emmy winner for Peak TV is simply in the eye of the beholder. But that’s one of the things about Peak TV when done well: we spend many episodes or seasons with some of the victims of these difficult men than we do with their killers. This lends it a sense of tragedy and pathos that you almost never get with these series. When Christopher told us that Tony Soprano was the man he was going to hell for, we might feel sympathy for him. When he turned over Adriana to become just another victim, we finally understood that he was, and it added a greater scope to the tragedy surrounded them. We knew Walter White had monstrous tendencies in the early stages of Breaking Bad, but it was because we got to know who Jane was that when he let her die solely to benefit himself, we saw the face of pure evil. And sometimes understanding why a man kills can makes us understand him – maybe even empathize. In the first season of Deadwood, there was no reason to think anything of Al Swearengen, other than he was a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer. But when Doc Cochran brought Reverend Smith  - a man dying a painful, agonizing death with no sense of reality – to him, and asked what he knew no other man in the camp could do, the death that follow almost seemed merciful, and changed our perception of the character going forward.  The death of a character on Peak TV is meaningless if it is for shock value –  like Shondaland, Game of Thrones, and far too many other series to mention – make it seem that way. If there is context, it has resonance.  Almost every series involving a serial killer doesn’t bother with any of that.

The serial killer-themed series will always have a place on television for the same reason the horror movies so many teenagers were scared by, because we have a deep and abiding fear of monsters.  It doesn’t matter if they’re wearing hockey masks and carrying axes or if they chop prostitutes up on the streets of New York.  Standing over the body of  yet another serial killer, Mulder would once say: “When all is said and done, there’s not much mystery in murder.”  When considering these kinds of shows, we have to consider there’s not much mystery about these kinds of killers either.