Oh, what’s become of us? Just a few years ago all we needed for entertainment were a few chirpy sitcoms and campy comedies but now, everything’s different. Maybe it’s the terrible times we find ourselves in that’s making us more attracted to tales of a darker nature – like Lily Sykes’ killer stage show The Maids. The jury’s still out on that but one thing we know for sure is that these days, it takes a full-on bloodbath to keep us hooked. It’s true. At the time of writing, five of the top 20 most popular podcasts in the US feature murder or crime, while This American Life’s 2017 viral hit S-Town shattered records by earning 10 million downloads in its first four days of release. Clearly, our hunger for the macabre is strong.
There’s a clear market for it too. Whether it’s before-it-was cool podcast mainstays Sword and Scale, Criminal or Generation Why or relative newcomers My Favourite Murder, the aptly titled Serial Killer or UK’s own All Killa No Filla, audiences don’t have to look far to satisfy their feverish need for gore. Meanwhile Netflix has carved out its own share of the killing frenzy, starting with 2015’s water-cooler mega-hit Making A Murderer (which returned this weekend) and culminating (so far) with a rehash of Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s The Staircase. Realising our need for another murder fix, the network tried its best to find more bloody hits in the meantime but ultimately shows like The Keepers and Evil Genius never quite managed to achieve the same success. Poor Netflix, it must be desperate for someone to get brutally-yet-mysteriously murdered right about now.
So what happened? Workspaces once dissected the exploits of fictional baddies like Walter White or Tony Soprano, now they’re debating the innocence or guilt of real life would-be killers. Who knew we had so many armchair defence attorneys amongst us, eh? Meanwhile, the shows’ unjustly murdered (and usually female) victims are reduced to nothing more than TV show MacGuffins, here to help us kill a lazy afternoon in front of the telly. When you put our current content trends on trial (because courtrooms seem to be all the rage at the moment), it paints a picture that says a lot about how we like to spend our downtime in 2018.
Maybe it comes back to the age we live and the constant barrage of shocking events we’re faced with every day and every time we open our phones. The world is a pretty chaotic place and finding a way to rationalise or compartmentalise the craziness can be overwhelming and all-but impossible. Neatly contained podcasts or nicely rounded episode-arcs on Netflix don’t have that problem though. By investing our spare time in them, could we in fact be finding a way to take control of the uncontrollable and get some much needed solace from the outside world? The fact that the vast majority of these cases are unsolved even gives us an opportunity to spout our opinions and unique takes which – as Twitter has proven – is something we just can’t get enough of. Maybe when the world calms down a bit we’ll return to Friends, Scrubs and reruns of tame comedies from times gone by. In the meantime we need the harder stuff to survive.
Words by Simon Bland, Digital Content Officer at HOME.
The Maids runs from Fri 14 Nov – Sat 01 Dec. Find out more and book tickets here.