The popularity myth: a Bourdieusian analysis of true crime media consumption in the United States

This study draws on Bourdieu’s field theory to critically examine the production and consumption of true crime media in the United States. Using multiple sources of viewership data, true crime’s popularity is assessed across three subfields: theatrical documentary film, television and the Netflix streaming platform. Contrary to many journalistic and scholarly assessments, the findings indicate that increases in true crime’s popularity have been modest and that its audience remains smaller than that of many competing genres. Only a small fraction of theatrical documentaries focused on crime. True crime television attracted small audiences compared to prime-time hits and now functions largely as low-cost programming for declining niche cable channels. On Netflix, crime narratives attracted more attention, but the fictionalized docudrama mode of true crime drew larger audiences than the traditional documentary-style mode of true crime. Overall, the findings provided little evidence of a true crime boom. Public perceptions of the genre’s dominance may reflect a popularity myth, defined here as a perceived elevation in a cultural object’s status coupled with a misrecognition of the structural realities of cultural production.