Australian true-crime TV has run out of ways to say 'based on a true story'

At some point in the last five years, Australian television decided that every real crime committed on this continent between 1970 and 2010 deserved its own limited series. I am not sure exactly when this decision was made or by whom, but the evidence is comprehensive. Underbelly started it (or continued what Blue Murder started, depending on your timeline). Then came Mr Inbetween, The Stranger, Clickbait, The Twelve, Last King of the Cross, The Newsreader (which is not technically true crime but operates in the same emotional register), and Nitram, which is a film but lives in the same cultural conversation. And there are more in the pipeline. There are always more in the pipeline.

The question is not whether these are good shows. Some of them are. Mr Inbetween was excellent. Nitram was one of the best Australian films of the decade. The question is what happens to a genre when it becomes the default mode of an entire national industry, and the answer, based on what I have been watching for the last eighteen months, is that it starts to eat itself.

The template and its limits

Australian true-crime TV has settled into a template so consistent that you can almost predict the trailer before a show is announced. A known crime. A period setting (usually the 1980s or 1990s, because those decades photograph well and the fashion is interesting). A male lead who is either the criminal, the detective, or the journalist. A desaturated colour palette. A soundtrack that uses Australian rock of the relevant era to establish time and place. An opening title card that says “Based on true events” or “Inspired by a true story” or some variation that the legal department has approved.

The template works. It has worked for twenty years, across multiple platforms and production companies. But the problem with a template that works is that nobody has any incentive to abandon it, and the result is a genre that has stopped asking itself interesting questions. When every true-crime series looks and sounds and moves in the same way, the individual shows stop being distinguishable from each other. They become interchangeable components of a content category rather than distinct pieces of storytelling.

I watched three Australian true-crime limited series in the first half of 2025. I am not going to name them because the point is not which three they were. The point is that I cannot clearly remember which plot details belong to which show. The corrupt cop was in one of them. Or two of them. The scene where the detective stands in a suburban kitchen and delivers the news to a wife who already knows was in at least two of them, possibly all three. The overhead drone shot of a weatherboard house surrounded by police cars was in all of them. I am certain of that.

The ethics question nobody wants to have

There is a harder conversation underneath the aesthetic one, and it is about whether the Australian screen industry has developed a responsible framework for turning real crimes into entertainment. The answer is: sort of, sometimes, inconsistently.

Nitram handled this well. Justin Kurzel made a deliberate decision not to depict the Port Arthur massacre on screen and structured the entire film around that absence. The result was a work that took its subject seriously without exploiting it. But Nitram is the exception, not the rule. Most Australian true-crime series do not demonstrate that level of ethical rigour. They reproduce violence, they dramatise the suffering of real people, and they rely on the “based on true events” framing to justify choices that would be questioned in a fictional context.

The families of victims have started pushing back. In 2024, at least two Australian true-crime productions faced public objections from the families of people depicted in the shows. The industry’s response has been to add consultants and sensitivity readers to the production process, which is better than nothing but is not the same as asking whether the project should exist in the first place.

What the audience numbers actually say

Here is the part that complicates the “genre fatigue” argument: the audience is still watching. True-crime content performs consistently well on Australian streaming platforms, and the international sales market for Australian true-crime series remains healthy. The genre fatigue is not a ratings problem. It is a creative problem. Audiences will watch true-crime television the way they will eat chips: reliably, without much discrimination, and in quantities that exceed what is good for anyone.

The danger is not that audiences stop watching. The danger is that the industry mistakes consistent viewership for creative health. A genre can be commercially viable and creatively exhausted at the same time. Australian true-crime TV is currently both. The shows make money. They fill slates. They satisfy the quota requirements that streamers will face under the ACMA framework. And they are, with occasional exceptions, indistinguishable from each other.

What Australian TV could be doing instead

The frustrating thing is that the creative energy and production capacity currently devoted to true-crime limited series could be used for genres that Australian television has historically underserved. Science fiction. Horror. Political satire (real political satire, not the gentle comedy of Utopia, which I love, but which is to political satire what a warm bath is to open-heart surgery). Workplace drama. Family saga. Any of the genres where Australia has a distinctive voice but rarely commits the production resources to develop it.

Mr Inbetween is the proof case. It is technically adjacent to true crime in its subject matter (organised crime, violence, the Melbourne underworld), but it works as a character study rather than a procedural. It is interested in the texture of its protagonist’s daily life rather than the mechanics of his crimes. It is funny, which true-crime series are almost never allowed to be. And it ran for three seasons, which gave it time to develop depth that a limited series cannot.

The path forward is not to stop making true-crime television. Australians committed crimes. Some of those crimes are interesting. Some of them deserve to be examined on screen. The path forward is to stop treating the genre as the default, the safe bet, the thing you pitch when you do not have a better idea. Australian television is capable of more than this. It has proven that, repeatedly, in the gaps between the true-crime series. The question is whether the industry is willing to bet on the gaps.

I am not holding my breath. But honestly, I would settle for one year where the slate is not sixty per cent “based on a true story.” Just one year. To see what happens.