Article Title: Real pain lies behind the fiction of true-crime dramas

Article Summary

In this article, the author talks about Crime drama and the vicarious impact it has on real-life victims. The author is a crime reporter and has covered headline-making cases from killings to abductions. But he is wary of fictionalised true crime as writers of dramas take the trauma of real lives, but then without the same obligations of accuracy and fairness that journalists or documentarians have, can play fast and loose to make fiction about relatively recent crimes. He talks about movies who have faced protests for making films without consent from those victims which inspired them and asks them to consider. However, films have also been successful in showcasing and campaigning for human rights and have prevented a miscarriage of justice. But the author says that writers sometimes go too far in the name of documentary privilege – in a quest to make the film as authentic as possible -while showing a lack of empathy for those with real memories of the crimes. He only asks them to show a little more compassion, to pause a little more before turning a cruel crime into our entertainment.