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How Netflix Conquered Bingeable True Crime
From ‘Wild Wild Country’ to ‘Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator,’ the streaming giant practically invented the docuseries
Eva Orner, the Oscar-winning producer of Taxi To the Dark Side and director of a just-released documentary, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, remembers a time when people didn’t exactly find her career thrilling.
“Twenty years ago when you were at a party and people said, ‘So what do you do?’ and I’d say, ‘I make documentaries,’ they’d kind of just back away slowly,” she says. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh my god, I only watch documentaries!’”
That cultural shift is good news for Orner and for her new film, a damning indictment of Bikram Choudhury, the hot yoga pioneer and sexual predator who assaulted his female devotees for decades before fleeing the country and an $8 million legal settlement. But why did that shift happen? The filmmaker believes it has everything to do with its distributor, Netflix.
“I mean, Bikram is about to go out to 190 countries and 150 million subscribers,” she says. “The one thing I want as a documentary filmmaker is for people to see my work. I want the world to know that [Choudhury] is a criminal. I want him to face justice. I want to give a voice to women who were abused. There’s not currently a bigger platform to do that.”
Though Netflix’s commitment to the genre can be traced back to the streaming service’s earliest days, the sea change truly began with the release of the docuseries Making a Murderer on December 18th, 2015. A 10-episode deep dive into the story of two Wisconsin men sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Teresa Halbach, the series became a sensation despite its uncharismatic protagonists, dreary location, and aggressive focus on poverty. Suddenly social media was abuzz, dissecting the byzantine legal proceedings of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey with the fervor of Bachelor fans debating who should receive the next rose.
A large part of this was timing. Along with the podcast Serial and HBO’s The Jinx, Making a Murderer heralded the arrival of the “true crime boom” in U.S. entertainment. While true crime programming had been gaining in popularity for years, much of the content was…
