For quite a few years now, true crime television has been about as hot as it gets. I haven’t been crazed to the extent some people have, though I’ll admit even I’ve seen a few of the shows that have come out. But as a lot of people have argued, there is something pretty distasteful, and maybe even ghoulish, about finding thrills and entertainment in the misery of others: “True” crime means we’re talking about real people, people who’ve been caused enormous amounts of pain and whose families continue to feel that pain, while we hit the “next” button on the remote and continue binging.
But there’s a remarkable four-part series running on HBO right now that might have found the way forward: it’s called Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, and it’s based on a book by the journalist Elon Green. The topic is clear from the title, but what this series does is to foreground the victims to a degree I’ve never seen before in one of these shows. We know what happened to each of the men who was killed, but we don’t linger on the details. Instead, we spend much of each episode hearing about who these people were, what they meant to the people who cared about them, and their places in the larger LGBTQ community of the city. We care about them as full human beings. And we’re also placed in the historical context of what’s happening, as we learn about what gay life was like in the city in the 1990s and about the constant threat of everyday violence from hateful people.
The investigation part of the story is still there, but even with that we learn something, as we get an idea of the struggles and tension between the gay community and the New York police. One detective who’s being interviewed for the series even asks the director why he’s focusing so much on the victims being gay and we wonder how a person could be so obtuse after everything that’s happened.
You can catch up with Last Call on Max.com, and the final episode airs on HBO this Sunday.
