NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — In 1989, Americans were fascinated by shooting murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion by their own children. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost all subsequent appeals. But today, more than three decades later, they have, against all odds, a chance to survive.

Not because of the way the legal system works. Because of entertainment.

After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the couple brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles the prosecutor recommended they will be felt.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment like the Netflix docudrama “Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez” brings about real changes in the lives of their subjects and in society in general. At their best, true-crime podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustices and right wrongs.

But because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.

Using true detective stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from the “penny press” tabloid newspapers of the mid-1800s to TV movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” these are podcasts, bingeable Netflix series and even real crime TikToks. Fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but it can be explained in part by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.

In the case of the Menendez brothers, Lylewho was then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent disclosure of the father’s long-term sexual abuse of Erik. But at their trial, many allegations of sexual abuse were not presented to the jury, and prosecutors argued they committed murder simply to get their parents’ money.

For years, this was the story that many people who watched the saga from a distance accepted and talked about.

The new dramas delve into the brothers’ childhoods, helping audiences better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less scary place, says Adam Banner, a criminal lawyer who writes a column on pop culture and law for ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.

“Not only does it make us feel better intrinsically,” Banner says, “but it also objectively gives us the ability to think, ‘Well, now I can take this thing and put it in a different compartment than another situation where I have no problem.’ explanation and the only thing I can say is, “This kid must just be bad.”

Much of True Crime Past takes particularly shocking crimes and explores them in depth, usually with the premise that the people convicted of that crime were actually guilty and deserved to be punished.

The success of the podcast » In series“, which casts doubt on conviction for murder of Adnan Syedhas given rise to a more recent genre that often assumes (and intends to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent or – as in the case of the Menendez brothers – guilty but sympathetic and therefore do not deserve heavy sentences.

“There’s an old tradition of journalists looking at criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, editor at the Marshall Project and author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty “. “.

“But I think the curve is increasing exponentially in the wake of ‘Serial,’ which was from 2014 and obviously changed the entire economic and cultural landscape of podcasts,” Chammah says. “And then there’s ‘Making a Murderer.’” a few years later and became kind of a giant example of it in the docuseries.

Around the same time, the innocence movement gained ground, alongside the Black Lives Matter movement and greater attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, the tendency is to exploit the story of a villainous character.

“All these superheroes, these supervillains, the movie ‘Joker’ — you’re just inundated with this idea that people’s bad behavior is shaped by trauma when they were younger,” Chammah said.

Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the effects of these cultural trends are real. Today’s juries are more likely to give their clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries about the emphasis in today’s true crime on cases where things have gone wrong, which he says are outliers.