Can Networks Make Enough ‘Murderers’ to Keep Up?

Unless you’ve been in solitary confinement the past few weeks, you know about the success of Netflix’s 10-part documentary series Making a Murderer. It follows a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery who was exonerated for a sexual assault he didn’t commit—convicted in 1985, he was released in 2003—only to be found guilty again in 2007, this time for a murder he might not have committed, either. It’s gripping, shocking, nauseating, and addictive—for the procession of injustices on display and for the filmmakers’ tenacity.

Netflix hasn’t released audience numbers, but the series is a hit; more than 45,000 amateur sleuths are tracking the case on a Reddit message board. Even before it became available in mid-December, the doc earned comparisons to two other recent true-crime smashes: the podcast Serial (about a young woman’s murder, supposedly at the hand of her high school ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed) and the HBO miniseries The Jinx (in which the possible killer and definite weirdo Robert Durst appears to confess to several murders). Serial has been downloaded more than 40 million times since its debut a little more than a year ago; The Jinx pulled in more than a million live viewers.