2025 Was The Year True Crime Entertainment Went Too Far

• Movies
• Documentaries

In the must-watch documentary "Predators," director David Osit (who also shot and edited the film) parses the legacy of infamous "Dateline NBC" segment "To Catch A Predator." The show used hidden cameras to film child predators as they visited homes where they believed young victims waited, only to be confronted by host Chris Hanson. In the documentary, ethnographer Mark de Rond describes the moment these men are caught, saying, "What you're seeing is effectively someone else's life end." The documentary then examines the question that nobody asked at the time: "Is there a cost to this kind of exploitative factual entertainment?"

Now, imagine watching "someone else's life end" when that someone is an innocent child whose entire world has been shattered by tragedy. That's what you get in 2025's "The Perfect Neighbor," the Netflix true crime doc from director Geeta Gandbhir that's made up almost entirely of body cam footage.

The documentary doesn't present this particular moment as entertainment and it isn't exploitative in the way "To Catch A Predator" was. In fact, it tells a hugely important story that powerfully showcases the harrowing real-life consequences of racism and the absurdity of Florida's stand-your-ground law. But it also provides the experience of watching a young boy become bereaved in real-time and if it was ethically questionable when we watched child predators' lives fall apart on-screen, then some significant moral line has to have been crossed when we watched a child's life fall apart before it had even begun. Whether it's the documentary's makers, us the audience, or both who crossed that line is just one of many questions left unanswered in a year in which it felt as though true crime had long since gone too far.

Are we waking up to the ethical cost of true crime?

"Predators" explores the moral culpability of creatives but also our own in consuming the destruction of lives as entertainment. Such a reckoning with our obsession with other people's trauma and grief had been long overdue. 

A decade after "Serial" season 1 created a generation of true crime podcast addicts, and "Making a Murderer" established Netflix as a true crime docuseries powerhouse, the genre that never goes out of fashion is still big business. As true crime continues to fascinate, however, our culture seems to be waking up to the ethical cost of it all. In 2022, a relative of a Jeffrey Dahmer victim said Netflix's "Monster" (which dramatized the murders of the infamous serial killer) was "retraumatizing" the family. Then, in 2024, the Netflix documentary "What Jennifer Did" caused controversy by using AI images of the killer. Finally, in October 2025, Osgood Perkins called out Ryan Murphy and his "Monster" series for "the Netflix-ization of real pain."

Meanwhile, a 2024 YouGov poll found that, since 2022, fewer Americans agreed that true crime media increases empathy with crime victims, representing a decline of 10 percentage points. What's more, fewer respondents thought that true crime media improves understanding of the criminal justice system (a drop of nine percentage points) or that it helps to solve crimes that would've otherwise gone unsolved (a drop of eight percentage points). And while more respondents said that it's ethical to consume true crime media than those who said it's unethical (50% vs 16%), 35% were unsure, which means that 50% of participants were either unsure or said true crime was unethical. As such, there have been discernible changes in our collective view of true crime of late, and 2025 should be a major turning point.

The Perfect Neighbor is a crushing documentary that raises important questions

"The Perfect Neighbor" focuses on Susan Louise Lorincz, a woman who, in 2023, shot and killed her Black neighbor Ajike Owens in Ocala, Florida. This horrific stand-your-ground murder occurred after Lorincz had repeatedly reported Owens, her children, and their friends to the police, claiming they had been trespassing and harassing her in her home. (They were simply playing on the grass outside.) When Owens, a mother of four, went to confront Lorincz after yet another incident, she was shot dead in front of her nine-year-old son, Israel.

Using doorcam and bodycam footage, the film lingers on Israel in the aftermath of the shooting as he descends into the vortex of trauma. It stays with him as paramedics try to play down the seriousness of his mother's condition to keep his spirit alive. When his father tells him his mother has died, however, we finally see that spirit crumble. It's truly unbearable to watch and not in a way that makes you feel empowered to speak out about this blatant injustice, but in a crushing, immobilizing way.

To be sure, this is significantly different from the gotcha moments from any of the aforementioned examples of exploitative true crime. Israel's harrowing experience isn't presented as some sort of sick punchline for our collective amusement. It isn't designed to appeal to our proclivity for schadenfreude, and it certainly isn't intended as entertainment. Still, while "The Perfect Neighbor" debuted to unanimous praise and a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score, there is an unshakable sense of, at best, unease and at worst outright shame that arises from watching this young man become paralyzed by grief, and nobody seems to be talking about it.

What is the real cost of true crime entertainment?

"The Perfect Neighbor" was made with the backing of Owens' mother Pamela Dias, who told The Hollywood Reporter, "Had we not gone forth with the film [...] [Owens] would have been just another dead Black person." But the critique here isn't that "The Perfect Neighbor" shouldn't exist. The point is that we would surely do well to ask whether witnessing this drawn-out chronicling of human agony, delivered via a high-brow documentary with Sundance awards and a veneer of respectability, might have a hidden cost.

It's bad enough that "The Perfect Neighbor" exists within the great homogenizer that is the Netflix interface, sandwiched between thumbnails of a grinning Matt Rife and some of the worst Netflix movies of all time. Then, there's the inescapable feeling that a majority of viewers will have witnessed Israel's pain merely as a way to pass an evening, probably while eating dinner. On top of that, the documentary is already being lost amid the tide of "content," symbolizing the way in which these documentaries have become as disposable as something like the Russo Brothers' abysmal "The Electric State."

More importantly, it would seem at best incurious to not ask the question that went unaddressed back when "To Catch A Predator" aired: Is there a cost to consuming this media as entertainment? "The Perfect Neighbor" is undeniably important for the story it tells and doesn't even purport to be entertainment. But it's also significant for showcasing, in detail, the destruction of a young man's life in a way that should have shaken us out of our true crime-induced desensitization. The fact that it arguably hasn't done so feels like the point of no return.