True-crime shows like Max’s Love & Death miss why people care about murder

polygon.com:

“I’m gonna kill you,” Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) sputters as she fights her former friend Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) for control of the ax that will soon end her own life. The declaration is blunt, leaving no room for interpretation. At least, not according to Candy. After all, by the end of the struggle, 30-year-old mother and schoolteacher Betty will be dead from 41 brutal ax wounds, and Candy will be the only one left alive to tell the story.

And oh, what a story it is. In terms of true-crime fare, the tale of Betty Gore’s death at the hands of Candace Montgomery has it all: infidelity, housewives behaving badly, feathered bangs, and, most importantly, bloody, bloody murder. So why does Love & Death, Max’s seven-episode limited series about the events and characters surrounding the case, feel like such a true-crime bust?

As the show serves us slices of sugary-sweet, heavily coded small-town drama (occasionally spiced up with a foreshadowed glimpse of the violence to come), we learn that appearance is everything in this community. Whether it’s the beloved pastor announcing the shameful end of her marriage, Betty catching side-eyes for openly criticizing the pastor’s replacement, or Candy arranging her alibi for Betty’s death around a laundry list of church events, each character in Love & Death feels the oppressive eyes of their community on them as they attempt to hide the cracks in their own performance of suburban bliss. But while a deep dive into the consequences of emotional repression and the myth of the nuclear family is certainly worthy fodder for TV, Love & Death takes things a step further. That’s where my opinion as a true-crime fan sours; there’s just something a bit yuck-o about adding “murder” to the