Spotlight, Serial and the Fetishization of Investigation Narratives
There’s a cynical perception that pops up a lot these days which proclaims the era of ‘proper’ journalism is behind us. It’s a perception based on things like the rise of Buzzfeed and the steady decline of print-based media organizations, along with the political power they once held. Whether or not that perception matches reality is pretty heavily debated but I think that at least some of the success found by podcast Serial, Oscar-winner Spotlight and Netflix’s Making a Murderer is rooted in their ability to play off this perception. They fetishize the process of investigation and allow us to vicariously experience what we imagine ‘real-journalism’ to be.
When it comes to TV, this trend towards fetishizing investigation isn’t all that revolutionary. In fact, it makes a lot of sense. TV, especially crime TV, has been trending towards longer-form storytelling for a number of years with the understanding that getting a more-dedicated medium-sized audience invested in a show is often more valuable than the brief-attention of a larger one. The process of investigation is an obvious go-to. TV audiences are familiar with the formula and writers just need to let a few more of the details of real investigation seep into the structure of their work.
Law & Order, NCIS or Criminal Minds have made their names off the familiar rhythms of investigation but the investigation’s of today’s crime fiction aren’t about the devil in the details, they’re entirely about the details. There’s an abstraction to the procedural format that’s not really present in the true crime investigations of Serial or Making a Murderer. In the minds of at least some, the catharsis of the denouement in crime stories can often run against the grain of how ‘real’ that crime story seems. The more confusing and filled with dead-ends an investigation narrative is, the closer to the real world it is seen to be by those people. When something like Serial takes this to the extremes it does, there’s no wonder it has found and connected with that audience.
For better or worse, this realism in turn translates into a sense of heightened investment in the narrative. One of Spotlight’s many merits isn’t that it just gets you to invest in the plight of the victims of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal but in the struggle of its journalists. It immerses audiences in every stage of the investigation, from the initial report to the hours the team spends pouring over paperwork. The biggest moments in the film don’t come from unexpected sources or evidence but from smaller details and patterns that exist on the fringes of the story, noticed only through hard work on the part of the film’s journalists — and the film glorifies and festishizes the traits that precipitate these moments.
Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer’s script delights in the details and almost mythologizes ‘the ethical journalism’ of days gone by without restraint. There’s a solemn moment in the film where the reporters of the Boston Globe observe how empty their office seems while a billboard for AOL looms in the distance. Deliberately or not, Spotlight can be seen as positioning its subject material as the last hurrah for old fashioned journalism. It begs the question of what a journo-drama set in 2016 might look like — a question that Serial fans are already familiar with.
It’ll be fascinating to see how Christopher Miller and Phil Lord tackle modern journalism in their upcoming TV adaptation of Serial. Given the pair’s penchant for curveballs, it’s uncertain how they’ll handle it — will it be an adaption of the events that Serial’s first season investigates or a pseudo-biographical drama about the podcast itself? Whatever form the pair’s series takes, it’s certain to be informed by how Sarah Koenig and company have handled the second season of the podcast.
Season 2 of Serial has been both criticized and applauded for breaking free of the the true-crime stylings it became famous for. As Koenig reminds audiences every episode, the series’ tagline and mission has always been to explore a story over the course of 12 episodes — not to tackle true crime cases — and the focus of the second season reflects this mantra. The questions that it is asks about Bo Bergdahl might be somewhat-easier to answer than those posed about Adnan Sayed’s case, but the questions themselves are also a lot richer. It’s not so simple as whether or not Bo did it, but more whether or not it matters why he did it. Koenig and company are using their fascination with Bergdahl’s case to touch on military culture, the war in Iraq and the ways that people construct and defend their own histories.
It’s easy to be cynical about the way that real-world investigations are being reconstructed for our entertainment — from their reliance on a potentially-unreliable perception of modern journalism to the way they almost-sideline the victims of real criminal acts. However, there’s the potential for raising awareness here — and that shouldn’t be too quickly dismissed. The most important step towards change is to understand something, and the first step towards understanding something is to ask questions — and every good investigation starts with questions.
These questions lead to answers and, finally, nuance. A lot of good storytelling is built on the ability to simplify, but perhaps the reason that complicated investigation narratives have become so commonplace is because that complexity feels so much closer to that in our own lives. It’s easy to imagine a world where the success stories attached to Serial or Spotlight are utterly stifled by their fascination with the laborious and the mundane. Instead, audiences celebrate these qualities. They acknowledge that things aren’t always so simple. They popularize an approach to storytelling blurs the lines between reality and entertainment in a number of different ways and, if nothing else, they suggest that perhaps audiences are ready for more complication and nuance in their entertainment.
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