‘#Cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders’ Review — True crime turns on it fans

A review of the new true crime docuseries, on Paramount+ now

When I reviewed Netflix’s Don’t F**k With Cats a few years ago, I was fascinated by the show’s final move. An online web sleuth turns directly to the camera and blames the viewers at home, claiming that the fact that people want to watch documentaries about murder is actually the reason the show’s murder happened. True crime has always been an ethically-thorny subject, but I’d never seen viewers so directly, aggressively implicated in the cost of consuming violence as entertainment. I wrote then that the true-crime reckoning may have begun.

It’s now a few years later, and the backlash is in full swing. From Joe Berlinger’s Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel to this month’s Max documentary They Called Him Mostly Harmless, we now officially have a true-crime subgenre all about how obsessive fans of true crime are fucking things up.

Paramount+ is the latest to the party with #Cybersleuths: The Idaho Murders, a docuseries about the TikTok virality of the 2022 murders of four students in Moscow, Idaho. The case was almost unbelievable: four people slaughtered in their beds so brutally that their blood seeped through the walls, while two other roommates apparently…