Television series
Evil Genius
A four-part Netflix documentary unpicking the 2003 "pizza bomber" case: a delivery driver dies with a bomb locked round his neck after a bank robbery gone catastrophically wrong. It's less whodunit than how-and-why, slowly exposing a small-town web of manipulation and mental illness. Methodical, grim, occasionally absurd — for viewers who want their true crime genuinely deranged rather than neatly packaged.
If you liked this
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst2015
HBO's forensic character study of Robert Durst has the same slow-burn dread as Evil Genius — a subject so bizarre you keep waiting for the filmmakers to be exaggerating. They aren't.
But Its ending is now infamous; if you already know what happens, some tension is gone.
Wild Wild Country2018
A small American town swallowed whole by a cult's outsized ambitions — the same collision of ordinary place and extraordinary personalities that makes Evil Genius so unsettling.
But Six episodes is a real commitment, and it sympathizes with its subjects more than you might expect.
Making a Murderer2015
The show that started the true-crime-as-slow-drip-obsession genre. Meticulous, infuriating, and built on the same faith that patient unraveling beats a tidy summary.
But It's long, one-sided by design, and the case never gets a clean resolution.
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Thin Blue Line1988
Same genre engine — the documentary as active investigation, decades before it became a Netflix formula.
Errol Morris's documentary essentially invented the reenactment-heavy true-crime style Evil Genius belongs to — cool, formal, unnervingly precise, and it actually got an innocent man out of prison.
But Austere and clinical rather than propulsive; no music-video pacing, no cliffhangers, just method.
More like this (8)
Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer2019
Amateur internet detectives chase a killer across continents in real time — the same sense of ordinary people stumbling into something monstrous and inventive that runs through Evil Genius.
But Deliberately upsetting in places, and its true-crime-as-thriller structure can feel a touch exploitative.
Abducted in Plain Sight2017
A documentary so relentlessly bizarre you'll question your own eyes — family dysfunction and manipulation stacked so high it becomes almost comic, much like Evil Genius's escalating insanity.
But Some viewers find its tonal whiplash between horror and absurdity distasteful rather than gripping.
American Murder: The Family Next Door2020
Built entirely from texts, police footage and home videos, it has the same eerie sense of watching a disaster assemble itself from ordinary domestic material.
But No talking-head hindsight or analysis — just raw material, which some will find too bleak and unmediated.
The Staircase2022
The original marathon true-crime documentary, following one case obsessively across years and appeals. Patient in exactly the way Evil Genius rewards patience.
But It's sprawling and slow by design — a real investment for a case with no clean answer.
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness2020
Proof that reality can out-write fiction — outrageous personalities, petty crime, and a plot that keeps topping itself, much like Evil Genius's gallery of unbelievable characters.
But Trashier and more chaotic in tone; it's spectacle first, insight a distant second.
I'll Be Gone in the Dark2020
A quieter, sadder cousin — true crime as personal obsession rather than entertainment, following one writer's decades-long pursuit of a killer.
But Slower and more melancholy than Evil Genius; it's about grief and fixation as much as the crime.
Compliance2012
Swaps documentary for drama but keeps Evil Genius's core puzzle: how does one manipulator make other people the instrument of the crime?
A scripted thriller based on a real hoax-caller scam, where one manipulative voice on the phone slowly bends ordinary fast-food workers into doing terrible things to each other.
But Deliberately claustrophobic and infuriating to watch — you'll want to scream at the characters, which is the point.
The Act of Killing2012
Same idea of "genius" turned monstrous and performative, pushed into a register Evil Genius never approaches: mass horror instead of small-town scheme.
Perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide reenact their own killings for the camera, often with disturbing pride — documentary as confrontation with real, unrepentant evil rather than tabloid curiosity.
But This is a different order of seriousness — political, historical atrocity, not true-crime entertainment. Not a casual watch.
