Binge-Watching Murder Is Deeper Than You Think

It’s another quiet evening. You’ve finished work, eaten dinner, and now you’re settling onto the couch for some well-deserved relaxation. You open Netflix, and there it is: a new ten-part documentary series about a seemingly charming suburban dad who was also a prolific serial killer. Or maybe it’s a podcast about a mysterious disappearance in a small town. Or a YouTube deep-dive into the chilling case of a con artist who destroyed countless lives.

Without a second thought, you press play. For the next several hours, you will be voluntarily immersing yourself in the most horrifying, tragic, and terrifying aspects of human existence. You will listen to accounts of unimaginable cruelty, see photos of grieving families, and hear the chilling details of real-life violence. And yet, this is what you’ve chosen to do to unwind.

If you step back for a moment, it’s profoundly weird. Why are we, as a culture, so utterly captivated by true crime? Why do stories of murder, deception, and abduction dominate the streaming charts and podcast rankings? Are we all just morbid ghouls, indulging a dark and unhealthy curiosity? It’s a tempting conclusion, but it’s too simple. The answer might be far more ancient and, in a strange way, more psychologically healthy than we think.

To understand our modern addiction, we need to travel back to ancient Greece and consult a philosopher who was obsessed with the purpose of storytelling: Aristotle.

Meet Aristotle. If his teacher, Plato, was a philosopher who lived in the clouds, dreaming of perfect, abstract forms, Aristotle was the man with his feet firmly on the ground. He was a biologist, a logician, a political scientist, and an ethicist. He was interested in the messy, observable world and how things actually worked—from the anatomy of a squid to the functioning of a democracy. And in his work, Poetics, he tackled the function of a very specific art form: Greek Tragedy.

He asked a question that's not so different from our own: Why did thousands of ancient Athenians gather in an amphitheater to watch plays about characters whose lives fall apart in the most gruesome ways possible? Why watch Oedipus accidentally marry his mother and blind himself? Why subject yourself to that kind of emotional turmoil?

Aristotle’s answer was a single, powerful word: Catharsis.

The Soul’s Deep Cleaning Service

Catharsis (from the Greek katharsis) literally means “purging” or “purification.” It’s a concept that feels more at home in medicine or religion than in literary criticism. But for Aristotle, it was the key to understanding the profound psychological purpose of tragedy.

He argued that in our daily lives, we accumulate a host of messy, repressed, and potentially destructive emotions—chief among them, pity and fear. We feel pity for the misfortunes of others, and we feel fear for ourselves, a constant, low-level anxiety that the universe is chaotic and our lives could be upended at any moment. These emotions, left unchecked, can fester within us.

A great tragedy, Aristotle believed, acts as a kind of emotional pressure cooker. By watching a "hero"—a decent, relatable person—suffer a terrible downfall due to a fatal flaw or a cruel twist of fate, the audience is forced to confront these emotions in a safe and controlled environment.

1. We experience Pity on an intense scale. We see the tragic hero, someone not unlike ourselves, and we weep for their undeserved suffering. Our hearts ache for their loss.

2. We experience Fear on an equally intense scale. We think, “If this could happen to them, it could happen to me.” The story taps into our deepest anxieties about vulnerability, mortality, and the randomness of fate.

   
   

The play builds these two emotions to an almost unbearable crescendo. Then, at the climax—the hero’s death or final, terrible realization—something magical happens. There is a release. The tension breaks. Having experienced pity and fear in such a concentrated dose, the audience is able to purge these emotions from their system. You walk out of the theater not depressed, but cleansed. Relieved. Lighter. You’ve faced the abyss from a safe distance, processed your deepest fears, and now you can return to your life with a renewed sense of emotional equilibrium. The soul has been given a thorough deep cleaning.

The Couch is the New Amphitheater

Now, let's switch back from the stone seats of the Theater of Dionysus to the plush cushions of your living room couch. The connection is startlingly direct. The modern true crime documentary is the Greek Tragedy of our time, and the streaming service is our catharsis machine.

The structure is identical. The victim in a true crime story is our tragic hero. They are almost always presented as a normal, relatable person—a bright college student, a loving mother, a friendly neighbor. This is crucial. We have to see ourselves in them to feel the full force of the story.

As we learn about their life, and then about the horrific crime, we are flooded with the two key Aristotelian emotions. We feel an overwhelming pity for them and their families. Their pain becomes our pain. Simultaneously, we feel a profound fear. The fact that these crimes often happen in mundane settings—a parking lot, a suburban home, a jogging trail—is what makes them so terrifying. The story whispers a horrifying truth: chaos can erupt anywhere, at any time. The protective bubble of civilization is thin.

The documentary then guides us through the investigation. This is our rising action, the part of the play where the plot thickens. The detectives are our Greek chorus, commenting on the events and slowly piecing together the puzzle. This process is deeply comforting; it’s the application of logic and order to a chaotic, terrifying event. It gives us a sense of control.

Finally, we reach the climax: the killer is identified and caught. The trial delivers a guilty verdict. This is the moment of catharsis. The fear of the unknown is resolved. The perpetrator is contained. The moral universe, which was violently thrown out of whack, is set right again. A sense of justice, however incomplete, is restored.

We can now turn off the TV. The emotional journey is complete. We have stared into the face of life's arbitrary cruelty, but from the safety of our home. We have vicariously experienced the ultimate loss of control, and then watched control be re-established. We have purged our pity and fear. And now we can go and double-check the locks on our doors, feeling strangely, unsettlingly, cleansed.

A Catharsis with Complications

This Aristotelian reading explains so much about the appeal of true crime. But our modern version of this ritual comes with some dark and complicated baggage that Aristotle could never have predicted.

First, there is the undeniable ethical problem. Oedipus was a fictional character. The victims in Making a Murderer or The Ted Bundy Tapes are real people. Their worst, most traumatic moments have been packaged and sold as entertainment for our emotional benefit. Are we achieving catharsis by exploiting real human suffering? Is there a point where a healthy psychological process becomes a form of voyeuristic, ethical rubbernecking? The line is uncomfortably blurry.

Second, does it actually work as intended? Aristotle’s catharsis was a communal event, a single, powerful experience you had a few times a year. Our true crime consumption is often a solitary, binge-watching affair, available 24/7. Does this constant firehose of fear-inducing content truly purge our anxieties, or does it actually amplify them? It’s possible we are trapping ourselves in a feedback loop, stoking our fears of the world and then consuming more true crime to feel a temporary sense of control, only to emerge more anxious than before. We might be seeking a cure that is also the disease.

Our Necessary Narratives

Ultimately, Aristotle provides us with the most compelling framework for understanding our dark fascination. True crime is more than just morbid curiosity; it’s a modern-day ritual for processing our most primal fears. In an increasingly uncertain and chaotic world, these stories, with their clear narrative arcs of tragedy, investigation, and justice, provide a necessary illusion of order. They are a safe space for us to confront the darkness, a way to experience and purge the pity and fear that hum beneath the surface of our everyday lives.

These narratives allow us to touch the void without falling in. They assure us that even though the world is a dangerous place, there are still heroes, there is still logic, and sometimes, there is still justice.

So, the next time you find yourself drawn to another story of a life tragically cut short, perhaps you don't need to judge yourself too harshly. You're not just being a ghoul. You're participating in an ancient human tradition, seeking a very modern form of catharsis. But it’s worth asking: what deep-seated fears in your own life, and in our collective culture, are you trying to purge?