Culture wars Underrated true crime gems deliver tawdry, crowd-pleasing thrills Take 5
By: Conrad Sweatman Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Thursday, Jul. 3, 2025

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This article was published 03/07/2025 (447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the defining conflicts of our era is liberalism versus populism: tricky “elites” in labs, newsrooms and political halls against the salt-of-the-earth know-nothings who try to expose their agenda.

However much these stereotypes hold water, what better snapshot of the clash between professional and everyday opinion than Rotten Tomatoes scores?

And is there a fiercer battleground between the Popcornmeter and the Tomatometer — between the masses and critics — than with true-crime shows?

While audiences lap up stories about a man secretly living in his ex-girlfriend’s attic, a serial killer turning his murders into bestselling “fiction” and a father faking a kidnapping-by-air-balloon of his son (yes, all real true-crime premises) — critics often plug their nose and finger-wag.

Audiences respond with a shrug or one-finger salute.

We’re not denying that lots of true crime is exploitative and trashy. (Duh, that’s part of the fun.) But in their zeal to swat away the genre’s worst, critics often go too far.

So let’s dive into a few underrated true crime gems, some dogged by critics. We won’t settle the culture wars, but hopefully we’ll leave you with a few bingeworthy picks.

The Jewel Thief (2023)

Film available on Disney+

Never mind Catch Me If You Can: here’s a true story of a brilliant young con artist every bit as taut, minus Steven Spielberg’s need for schmaltzy resolutions. It’s also largely set in Winnipeg.

Even as a petty teenage thief, Gerald Daniel Blanchard was a prodigy — orchestrating Ocean’s 12-level cons and escapes in the shopping malls and police stations of Omaha, Neb.

His first major heist in Winnipeg, where he had moved in the early 2000s, baffled Winnipeg police and involved baby monitors, hiding overnight inside a bank’s walls and misdirected security alarms.

He would repeat this formula across the country — revenge, as his mother insisted, for the way the banks had treated his indebted family as a child. (Kudos if you catch the bylines of Free Press reporters Mike McIntyre and Aldo Santin in some of The Jewel Thief’s newspaper montages about the rash of robberies.)

Blanchard’s most famous heist has the stuff of Hollywood’s old European capers: a priceless Austrian royal heirloom, a replica from the museum’s gift shop and a (possibly) parachuted escape.

Museum curators and the Winnipeg Police Service followed Blanchard’s exploits with obvious awe, like Tom Hanks’ character in Catch Me If You Can. And also like Hanks’ character, Winnipeg police detectives on Blanchard’s case were obsessed with catching the thief who taunted them at every turn.

Ultimately, you may find your sympathies split.

The film’s Winnipeggers emanate a funny pride knowing that the world’s greatest living thief is one of theirs and we may succumb to it too. Still, after spending some time with the vain and eccentric Blanchard, we have a harder time enjoying the man as much as the (con) artist.

Q: Into the Storm (2021) Television series available on Crave and HBO

Q is a 2021 documentary about QAnon, a “deep state” conspiracy that imagines that the American government is beholden to a vast network of liberal, Satan-worshipping sex traffickers. If that sounds unbelievable, at its height, 30 per cent of Republicans expressed support for some of its beliefs.

Populism, then, at its most bonkers.

The conspiracy’s two heroes are Q, an alleged high-level government whistleblower, and Donald Trump — supposedly working together to expose this cabal and restore power to “We, the People.”

Q: Into the Storm is an investigative look into the weirdos who run the 8Chan forum, where Q fired out his puzzle-laden messages — as well as the movement’s top-level backers in Trump’s camp.

While the series earned a 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter — a strong audience hit — it was panned by many critics. They chastised director Cullen Hoback for not being harsher with his far-right subjects, as though bullying is a useful way to get cagey subjects to open up.

They accused him of “platforming” his subjects — as though he would convert viewers to conspiracies about globalist pedophile cabals just because the porn-addled neckbeards on screen say they are so.

This is the sort of patronizing take that was perhaps more common among progressives in the highly tense moments of the early pandemic. Nonsense, in any case.

Certainly, the viewer has to stomach a lot of screen time with the low company who run 8Chan.

But Hoback is civil to them in the service of an important goal: to unmask the cynical actor behind the Q account, who (don’t tell us this is a spoiler) clearly isn’t a real whistle-blower, but rather someone with a vested interest in hoodwinking sorry heartland boomers bad at the internet.

In this, Hoback offers a public service within the scope of an exciting, oddball political thriller that culminates in the Jan. 6 United States Capitol attack.

White Hot Hate: Season 1 (2021) Podcast series available through CBC

Here’s another series about infiltrating far-right organizations — this one with stronger critical accolades. It draws out all the intrigue surrounding former Free Press reporter Ryan Thorpe’s brave undercover work inside the Base, a militant neo-Nazi organization.

After Thorpe exposed Patrik Mathews, the leader of the Base’s local cell, in a 2019 Free Press article, Mathews went on the lam, kicking off a cross-border manhunt.

This six-episode CBC podcast series shows this alarm was well-justified, as it traces Mathews’ movements through the United States, thanks to further FBI investigations into Mathews’ dangerous cadre.

While White Hot Hate landed in The Atlantic’s top 20 picks for 2021 podcasts, it’s perhaps lesser-known series than other series on our list, owing to being a podcast (and Canadian).

The Vow (2020-22) Television series available through Crave and HBO (alert: some spoilers)

The Vow is an irresistible soap-opera tangled up with more profound themes than its filmmakers know what to do with. Its central villain is Keith Raniere, a self-help guru who’s downright evil when he’s not just punchably smug. Once lauded as a prodigy, he’s now serving 120 years in prison.

Mixing Ayn Rand, New Age wackery and pseudoscience, Raniere’s company NXIVM (pronounced “nexium”) hawked pricey “human potential” courses aimed at people of influence. It wormed its way into Hollywood, corporate America and the upper reaches of Mexican politics.

NXIVM’s high priestesses included Clare Bronfman, heiress to the Seagram fortune, and Hollywood actress Allison Mack.

The company was supposed to teach its students to author their own destiny by accepting that “there are no ultimate victims” and other lessons of rugged individualism.

Devotees clawed their way up the culty company’s multi-level marketing structure, thinking they were moving closer to self-actualization and a gainful position, but this was always out of reach — one more course or one more creepy, criminally abusive “session” with the doe-eyed sadist Raniere away.

It wasn’t until Raniere’s secret sex ring — also (it gets stranger) a pyramid scheme with “masters” recruiting “slaves” recruiting more “slaves,” all held in check by mutual blackmail — came to light that Raniere’s exploits finally landed him in jail.

The first episode makes the gist of most this known and Season 1 follows some of NXIVM’s top brass as they try to defect from the cult, expose Raniere and wrestle with their conscience.

So far, so salacious. The series also flirts with a sharp critique of American bootstraps capitalism, self-help culture and society’s treatments of abuse survivors, though it doesn’t fully commit.

Reviewers faulted The Vow’s filmmakers for not digging into their material and subjects with more critical rigour and they have a point, but the material is still gripping and it’s a wonder how deep they burrow into one of the world’s most infamous cults.

Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes (2021) Film available on Netflix

Critics trash true crime in proportion to its obsession with sadists, making serial-killer stories the most readily panned. But the popular fascination with these monsters isn’t just a lurid thing — it’s natural, a sort of survival exercise, to want to make out humanity’s darkest archetypes from the safe remove of our TV room.

Netflix’s Memories of a Murderer is a uniquely slick series about an urbane monster who haunted North London in the 1980s. The filmmakers show him fitting a stereotypically sadist mould: an elitist esthete. His pretentious diary entries, narrated with theatrical gusto, ooze a sort of art-for-art’s sake approach to evil.

The old trashy made-for-TV true-crime shows stopped every five minutes so their campy narrators could solemnly condemn their villains. By contrast, Memories of a Murderer is cinematic, oddly amoral, in tone. The only narrator is a dramatized Nilsen.

Its slick art direction is similar to Netflix’s Mindhunters and other David Fincher projects about criminal predators, though at times it’s almost too stylized to work as popular entertainment.

This can be tasteless in its own way, feeling a little too close to the villain’s perspective. Nonetheless, possibly against viewers’ better judgment, Memories of a Murderer is a gripping watch.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca