The most depressing line in Netflix’s latest true-crime docuseries hit, American Nightmare, comes in the last of its three parts. “All I wanted this whole time was someone in law enforcement I could call a hero,†says Denise Huskins, a kidnapping victim and one of the series’ central figures. The doc does find that person: Misty Carausu, whom it presents as the sole police officer responsible for identifying Huskins’s kidnapper and rapist. What’s striking about American Nightmare, though, is not that it finds a cop it can call heroic, but that Carausu is a lone voice against a tidal wave of her colleagues’ disinterest, bias, incompetence, and lack of professionalism. Unlike the default mode of true-crime docuseries from the past several years — and decades of ongoing linear shows like Cops and The First 48 before them — American Nightmare is uninterested in presenting investigators as well-intentioned hard workers stumped by a mastermind. It’s a document of police indifference in which the typical explanation for law-enforcement failure has been turned on its head: not a few bad apples, but a dismal search for a single good one.
Over the past several months, a small crop of true-crime docuseries making similar arguments has appeared. On HBO, Last Call adapted Elon Green’s book about the murders of several gay men in New York in the early ’90s, crimes that went unsolved for years as police failed to adequately investigate violence against gay people. Telemarketers followed the Fraternal Order of Police’s involvement in illegal telemarketing schemes. Murder in Boston chronicled the widespread harassment of Black men in Boston following Carol Stuart’s murder in 1989. Hulu’s Never Let Him Go, a four-part ABC News–produced documentary, related the death of Scott Johnson, who was found at the bottom of an Australian cliff in the 1980s. All ask the same questions: What if police are not the best narrators of crime? What if there’s no unusual, individually malicious reason for why some victims are ignored and some crimes barely investigated? What if it’s all widespread institutional bias?
Crime and true-crime stories that center police perspectives tend to follow a few immensely familiar repeating arcs. Investigators begin working a case, identifying leads and carefully considering evidence. They push people in interrogations, often following gut impressions of a suspect before finding the evidence to back up their suspicions. Police voices are dominant, authoritative storytellers; either they speak directly to the camera and describe their own memories and actions, or their actions and the evidence they find are presented as neutral and objective. This is visible in recent Netflix series like Night Stalker: Hunt for a Killer and Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, but it’s even more widely codified in the early true-crime formats of network TV and basic cable. Shows like The First 48 take the point of view of police, who appear as talking heads and describe their thought processes as they approach a crime scene. America’s Most Wanted, which returned to Fox in January after several cycles of cancellations and revivals, begins with host John Walsh describing the way the show partners with law enforcement, accompanied by footage of Walsh and others watching police officers barge into buildings and make arrests. Stumbling blocks often appear — trails go cold, the facts don’t add up, some crucial piece of evidence is missing — but the narrative is generous toward law enforcement’s intention and skill.
As if in response, the anti-copaganda genre is slowly building its own language of repeating shapes and structures. American Nightmare demonstrates several of the most common elements, beginning with a police-presented narrative told as a neutral description of events — which the series then reveals to be just one incomplete perspective on the story. Here is Aaron Quinn, who called police one morning to explain that his girlfriend, Denise Huskins, had been abducted several hours earlier. As Quinn tells his story, Vallejo Police Department detective Mat Mustard becomes suspicious: Why didn’t he call them sooner? Why are the details of the kidnapping (swim goggles, wetsuits) so strange? Surely Quinn is faking his involvement in Denise’s disappearance. But Quinn refuses to budge during interrogation. Then comes the first turn. When a journalist receives a proof-of-life call from Huskins, police decide it sounds too casual, and, actually, Huskins and Quinn must’ve made the whole thing up.
American Nightmare proceeds as if from the perspective of the police, presenting evidence before cutting to talking-head interviews with lawyers and a journalist covering the case who describes how the police’s thinking evolved over the next few days. Simultaneously, the doc incorporates present-day footage of Quinn, so that when the police narrative begins to turn toward him as a suspect, Quinn’s own voice describes his increasing desperation. Huskins’s captor eventually releases her and she returns home without intervention from law enforcement. Footage from a police press conference shows the Vallejo PD scolding both Huskins and Quinn for pulling a prank on the cops. “The statement that Mr. Quinn provided was such an incredible story, we initially had a hard time believing it, and upon further investigation, we were not able to substantiate any of the things he was saying,†police lieutenant Kenny Park says into a microphone. “I can go one step further to say this,†he continues. “Mr. Quinn and Ms. Huskins have plundered valuable resources away from our community.†The series intercuts this footage with shots of Quinn in the present day, aghast, clutching his head in disbelief and anger. Quinn, the docuseries suggests, is obviously not involved in a crime, even though police are implicating him.
At this point, the police version of the story and Quinn’s version feel like equally weighted possibilities, with little clarity about who is telling the truth. American Nightmare then turns its attention to a cultural touchpoint beyond just this case. The recent release of the film Gone Girl, the docuseries suggests, has completely stymied investigators, who are familiar with the movie and decide Huskins must have been inspired to stage her own kidnapping. At no point do police consider that they are the ones largely inspired by the recent movie. That explanation bleeds into national media coverage, with clips from cable news insisting Huskins is a real-life gone girl. Only then does American Nightmare add a third POV from Huskins herself, whose story entirely matches Quinn’s version of events. The complete confidence of those police press conferences cannot just be an error, the series implies. It’s gross disregard.
This shift from a police version of events into a broader cultural context is also deployed by Murder in Boston and Never Let Him Go. Something that looks and feels like a neutral narrative, presented from the perspective of police investigators, creates one plausible version of events: For Murder in Boston, it’s the idea that the perpetrator, described by the victim’s husband, must be a Black man; in Never Let Him Go, the question is whether a murder occurred at all or if the victim’s death was accidental. In both cases, the victims or their families admit their growing suspicion that law enforcement is mishandling the case, and these scenes are often shown in counterpoint, a running commentary on the version given by police. Murder in Boston then moves into context about racism and segregation in Boston, much as Never Let Him Go lingers on long-standing homophobia in Australia. Last Call provides an astonishing amount of research on anti-gay rhetoric and the backgrounds of each victim. Then, just as American Nightmare in episode two, alternative explanations begin to emerge. What if the husband in Boston was lying, but the police never considered that? What if police are overlooking related patterns of violence in Sydney? What if the Last Call murders were the work of a serial killer? What if Denise Huskins was telling the truth all along?
At first, that scene where Huskins describes how desperately she wanted a hero feels like an attempt to soften the series’ depiction of law enforcement’s apathy and incompetence. Most of these series have similar moments: In Last Call, a task force across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania eventually investigates these crimes as a whole and uncovers the perpetrator. In Murder in Boston, an infuriatingly slow shift toward investigating Stuart’s husband eventually clicks into place; he dies by suicide once suspicion turns to him. In American Nightmare, Misty Carausu finds an unrelated strand of blonde hair at a crime scene 30 miles away weeks after Huskins’s abduction, and only her determination to find the victim it belongs to leads her back to Huskins.
But the final beats of these series are never just about celebrating the few voices who stood against the larger culture. They focus on the cost to everyone involved and the ongoing ramifications. American Nightmare’s are especially infuriating: The internal culture of the Vallejo police department is unchanged, as demonstrated by a series of images detailing the case’s effect on the department. “None of the officers involved in Aaron and Denise’s case were disciplined,†one reads. “Lead detective Mat Mustard was awarded officer for the year for 2015.â€
This move toward emphasizing broader social context becomes its own form of indictment. It allows these series to suggest that the specific oversights and errors made in these cases are the results of a larger cultural problem within police institutions, not just human error or a few cops who are bad at their jobs. Individually, each of these series suggests that police are not effective at investigating crimes among certain marginalized communities or crimes with white male perpetrators. Collectively, they suggest that police narratives should always be met with skepticism. And they offer an intriguing future for true-crime TV. Audiences have grown used to the trope of a person sitting down in the interview chair, getting their mics adjusted before they speak to the camera. They’re familiar with the onscreen timeline, with the establishing-shot drone footage. These anti-copaganda series may well become the foothold for a new device: a police interview that cuts to footage of a victim watching that same interview, reacting with fury.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated how the Last Call killer was caught.