After nearly a decade's worth of different productions, Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book about murder and Mormonism finally reached screens. Albeit the small screen in the form of a crime miniseries that was released on Hulu back on April 28th, 2022. Under the Banner of Heaven features Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) wondering how he can hold onto his faith while investigating the murder of a Mormon mother and her baby girl.
The show is still ongoing, but if fans are after more true crime-based dramas, they’ll be sure to enjoy these alternative suggestions. That is, if they haven’t seen them already.
5 Interrogation
Originally on CBS All Access, now called Paramount Plus, Interrogation went in a unique direction in being a non-linear crime drama series. The show was inspired by the Bruce Lisker case, in which a young man was wrongfully accused of murdering his mother and imprisoned for over 20 years before he was exonerated.
Instead of using a book as a basis, 9 of the show’s 10 episodes would be based on a real interrogation taken from the police files. The idea was that viewers could dip into any of these 9 episodes in any order they’d like, before catching the finale in its 10th episode. While the experiment wasn’t a complete success with critics, its experimental nature is worth commending.
4 I Am The Night
Also on Hulu, I Am the Night is based on Fauna Hodel’s memoir One Day She’ll Darken. The show follows Hodel (India Eisley) as she tries to uncover the secrets of the past. Is she biracial like she was led to believe? Why did her birth mother give her up? With the help of journalist Jay Singletary (Chris Pine), they look into her roots and find a gynecologist called George Hodel.
Hodel was a big figure in LA’s medical world who might’ve been involved in the notorious Black Dahlia murder case. Hodel and Singletary just need to find out how involved he was. Except not everyone is willing to let them dig so deep. The show got fair reviews, particularly for Pine’s performance and its opening episodes that go into Hodel’s past and the Dahlia case itself.
3 Dirty John
Instead of books or police files, Dirty Johnbases itself on a podcast. Viewable on Netflix, the show follows Debra Newell (Connie Britton) as her romance with John Meehan (Eric Bana) gradually goes south. It turns out the charming anesthesiologist she knew was just one of many facades John used to con women. Pity she didn’t learn that before she had two daughters - Veronica (Juno Temple) and Terra (Julia Garner) with him.
The real life case of John Michael Meehan is relatively recent too, ending with his life in August 2016. The original podcast, hosted by Christopher Goffard, began just a year later in October 2017. Both it and the show cover heavy themes like domestic abuse and how abused people react to it. Harsh as it is, it received a strong enough response to get a second season. Except, since Meehan’s story was complete, it follows the Betty Broderick case- a similar story about lies, deceit and murder.
2 Des
Available on Amazon Prime, Des is a very short TV drama - just 3 episodes - about the Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen, aka the Muswell Hill Murderer. In real life, Nilsen lured between 12 and 15 young men and boys to his London home, then killed and dismembered them for his personal self-gratification to put it politely. He began killing in 1978 and kept going for 5 years until he was caught and imprisoned for life. He died in 2018 following surgical complications.
The show follows the events of his arrest in 1983, when Nilsen (David Tennant) and his fellow residents called out for a plumber to fix a blockage. Only for the plumber to discover the blockage was caused by Nilsen’s disposal of his ‘work’. As grisly as it is, the show has been praised for featuring one of Tennant’s best performances and pulled in 5.4 million viewers back on its original TV broadcast in the UK.
1 Mindhunter
Based upon the book of the same name by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Netflix’s Mindhunter follows two FBI agents - Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff)- and psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv). They seek to know how serial killers’ minds work, so they interview them within the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit before applying what they’ve learned to ongoing cases.
The show takes place during the early days of criminal profiling during the late-70s and early 80s. So, its episodes manage to cover some of America’s most notorious killers and cases. Edmund Kemper, the Son of Sam killer, the BTK killer, and the Wayne Williams case all appear across the show’s two seasons. With executive producer David Fincher also directing most of the episodes, Mindhunter should click especially well with fans of his feature-length flicks like Zodiac and Gone Girl.