On Television - Mock Epic

“American Vandal” captures the true-crime craze.

- Amanda Petrusich

There may be no genre of television easier to parody than true crime. The style is formulaic by design: an atrocity is followed by an investigation, a left turn, a revelation, fin. Think “America’s Most Wanted,” or “Dateline.” Fictionalized variations of the idea, in which a crime is committed, scrutinized, and solved within the hour, are called procedurals for good reason. The accoutrements (plastic evidence bags, grainy security footage, an incriminating fibre tweezed from a corpse) are consistent from episode to episode, and the action unfolds in the same way each time. True crime allows for more uncertainty— sometimes the wrong man is fingered—but the sight of a perpetrator being hustled off in handcuffs remains satisfying, because we knew it was coming, and because it signals the deliverance of justice. Bad things happen, but not without consequences.

The popularity of true crime (and its dramatized brethren) has never really ebbed. But in late 2014, when the podcast “Serial” débuted, to considerable acclaim—it examined the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an eighteen-year-old high-school student—the genre was suddenly allotted new mainstream credence. (Two similar TV series, “The Jinx,” on HBO, and “Making a Murderer,” on Netflix, appeared in 2015.) Yet perhaps the best proof of true crime’s resurgence is “American Vandal,” an eight-episode series released by Netflix earlier this year. The show applies the grave and dramatic conventions of the form to a delightfully absurdist transgression: someone at the fictional Hanover High School spray-painted a bunch of cherry-red dicks on twentyseven cars in the faculty parking lot.