September has clearly decided that summer is over.
August gave us Manson, betrayal and Boeing. September responds with domestic terrorism, serial killers, unsolved disappearances, a live-radio hostage crisis and enough Ryan Murphy revisionism to keep historians muttering into their coffee until Halloween.
This is also one of those months where scripted true crime is doing almost as much work as documentary.
Netflix has Jacob Tremblay playing a young Ted Kaczynski. MGM+ has Jon Hamm caught in the middle of an extraordinary 1977 hostage standoff. Investigation Discovery is attempting something genuinely unusual with Aileen Wuornos. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Monster anthology has reached Lizzie Borden and apparently looked at one of America’s most disputed murder cases before deciding what it really needed was more sex, more blood and Aileen Wuornos somehow turning up more than a century later.
We’ll get to that.
First, the good stuff.
September 4—Teenage Wasteland(Netflix)September 7—O.J. Unseen: Exploitation of Evil(Investigation Discovery/HBO Max)September 7—Somebody Knows Something: Garage Sale Murder(Freeform/Hulu)September 14—Somebody Knows Something: Vanished on Loop RoadandSecrets in the Swamp(Freeform/Hulu)September 15—I Survived a Serial Killer(Netflix)September 17—Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story(Netflix)September 20—American Hostage(MGM+)September 25—UNABOMBER(Netflix)September 30—The Widower: ’Til Death Do Us Part(Netflix)September 30—Unmasking a Monster: Aileen Wuornos(Investigation Discovery/HBO Max)
It’s a strong month.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest shows is also giving us our first official Crime Club recommendation to maybe watch literally anything else.
The vibe: Harvard classrooms, psychological experimentation, mail bombs and one of the longest manhunts in FBI history. Ted Kaczynski has been examined so many times that another dramatization might initially sound unnecessary. Netflix has at least found an interesting way into the story.
Rather than beginning with the bearded recluse already living in his Montana cabin, UNABOMBER moves between two periods: Kaczynski’s development from a 16-year-old Harvard prodigy into a violent anti-technology extremist, and the FBI investigation attempting to identify the man responsible for a bombing campaign that stretched across nearly two decades.
Jacob Tremblay plays the younger Kaczynski, while Russell Crowe appears as Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, whose controversial experiments involved Kaczynski while he was a student. Shailene Woodley plays FBI agent Joanne Miller as the film moves toward the investigation that eventually brought the Unabomber’s campaign to an end.
The danger with telling Kaczynski’s story has always been turning explanation into excuse. Three people were killed and 23 others injured during his bombing campaign. Whatever psychological experiments, isolation or resentment shaped the man he became, none of them make his victims incidental to the story.
Why it’s the headliner: Because this is the month’s most ambitious crime dramatization and, at 98 minutes, mercifully avoids stretching a story into eight episodes simply because streaming television discovered the pause button. It also tackles the part of Kaczynski’s life many people know least about: how a gifted teenage mathematician ended up becoming America’s most notorious domestic bomber.
Proceed with caution: Bombings, death, psychological manipulation and the perennial true-crime danger of making an intelligent killer appear more profound than he actually was.
Binge cost: One movie. One evening.
Group chat factor: High. Particularly once everyone starts arguing about Harvard, Henry Murray and how much weight should be placed on Kaczynski’s psychological history.
The vibe: Three hours with America’s most overexposed cult leader — except the most interesting voices aren’t his.
August’s Conversations with a Killer finale has hung around for good reason. Joe Berlinger’s three-part series was marketed around 137 previously unheard prison phone calls Manson made during the final years of his life, but the recordings themselves aren’t necessarily the revelation.
Manson still sounds like Manson.
The stronger material comes from the people who actually lived inside his orbit, including former Family members Dianne Lake, Catherine Share and Stephanie Schram. Their accounts give the documentary something far more valuable than another opportunity to listen to Manson perform his familiar rambling mythology. They show what living under his control actually looked like.
The series also digs back through the Tate-LaBianca murders, the prosecution and the circus surrounding Manson’s trial, while trying to explain why this particular criminal became a permanent fixture in American culture.
Why it’s still trending: Because Manson remains one of true crime’s strangest contradictions. He didn’t personally commit the murders for which he became infamous, yet his name eclipsed almost everyone who did. More than half a century later, we’re still talking about him. Perhaps that says as much about us as it does about Charles Manson.
Group chat factor: Very high, especially among viewers arguing over whether anything genuinely new can still be said about this case.
The vibe: High-school journalism accidentally wanders into The Sopranos.
In 1991, students in Middletown, New York, began investigating something disturbing happening around their community. What they uncovered went considerably further than anyone expected.
Teenage Wasteland, from Boys State filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, reconstructs the investigation using archival footage, interviews and the students’ own diaries, following a group of teenagers as questions about toxic waste eventually lead toward organized crime. That makes this something unusually rare in true crime: a coming-of-age story in which the kids aren’t merely living alongside the mystery. They’re investigating it.
There’s also something wonderfully pre-internet about the whole premise. No Reddit threads. No TikTok detectives. No amateur sleuth announcing that they’ve “enhanced” a license plate using an iPhone. Just teenagers, notebooks and the growing realization that the story they’ve stumbled into is considerably bigger than they are.
Why it works: Because the crime story is only half of it. The other half is watching teenagers discover journalism, power and the uncomfortable fact that adults don’t necessarily have everything under control.
Binge cost: One documentary. Done before bedtime.
The vibe: A familiar serial-killer case told using technology that is either fascinating, deeply unsettling or both.
Aileen Wuornos is hardly an obscure figure. Her killings have inspired documentaries, books and one of the most acclaimed serial-killer films ever made. Charlize Theron won an Oscar for playing her in Monster more than two decades ago. So Investigation Discovery needed a reason to tell the story again. It found one in technology.
The three-part Unmasking a Monster uses digital replication, visual effects and a physical performance by actress Morag Peacock to reconstruct documented statements from Wuornos, investigators and people around her. That sentence alone should make your eyebrows move.
The producers stress that the technique isn’t being used to invent testimony. The recreated material is drawn from transcripts, recorded evidence and documented firsthand accounts. The idea is to visualize moments for which no camera footage exists. It’s an interesting experiment because true crime has spent years wrestling with increasingly elaborate reenactments. This pushes the concept considerably further.
Why it’s the deep dive: Because beneath the technological hook remains one of the most complicated serial-killer stories in modern American history. Wuornos murdered seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. She maintained that the killings began as acts of self-defense against men who attacked or attempted to rape her, although there was never any evidence for this, and her accounts changed over time.
Her childhood was brutal. Her adult life was chaotic. Her crimes were real. The challenge has always been acknowledging the first two without allowing them to swallow the third.
Proceed with caution: Murder, sexual violence, prostitution, childhood abuse and reconstructed imagery designed to make historical testimony feel unnervingly immediate.
Watch strategy: Watch the technology, but pay more attention to the evidence underneath it. That’s where the actual story is.
The vibe: History enters Ryan Murphy’s house and does not come out looking healthy.
Lizzie Borden is one of the great genuine mysteries in American criminal history. Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered inside their Fall River, Massachusetts, home on August 4, 1892. Lizzie was prosecuted and then acquitted by a jury, while nobody else was ever convicted. That uncertainty should be the entire reason to dramatize the case.
Instead, Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story appears determined to replace ambiguity with whatever makes the juiciest television. The series builds heavily around an illicit sexual relationship between Lizzie and Irish maid Bridget Sullivan, presenting it as a formative part of Lizzie’s repression, anger and eventual transformation. There is no historical evidence proving such a relationship existed, and the theory largely entered popular culture through novelist Evan Hunter’s 1984 fictional book Lizzie.
Even Ella Beatty, who plays Borden, has described the character she and the filmmakers created as a “very fictionalized version” of the real woman. Apparently, that is one of the smaller liberties the series takes. It also brings Aileen Wuornos into the story, with Sarah Paulson playing the Florida serial killer who was not born until 64 years after the Borden murders.
You can probably see where our patience begins to fray. None of this would matter nearly as much if Monster were simply selling itself as gothic historical fantasy, but this franchise has repeatedly wrapped sensational invention around real crimes and then placed the word “Monster” above photographs of actual people.
Its Jeffrey Dahmer season was enormously successful, but relatives of Dahmer’s victims publicly complained that the production retraumatized families and profited from their suffering. Critics also questioned whether ten hours supposedly devoted to challenging Dahmer’s mythology ultimately spent far too much time inside his head.
Then came the Menendez brothers. That season took disputed theories surrounding Lyle and Erik Menendez and dramatized some of them with extraordinary confidence, including homoerotic and incestuous elements that provoked furious criticism from the brothers and members of their extended family. Their relatives called the series a “grotesque shockadrama” and accused it of being filled with mistruths.
Ryan Murphy’s response was essentially that the series was presenting theories that had existed previously. That is exactly the problem. A theory existing somewhere does not make it fact, and historical ambiguity is not an inconvenience that needs to be filled with the sexiest available explanation.
Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and we do not know who killed Andrew and Abby Borden. We do not know that Lizzie was sleeping with Bridget Sullivan, either. What we can say with considerably more confidence is that Aileen Wuornos was not wandering around 1892 Massachusetts dispensing thematic commentary.
Why we’re avoiding it: Lizzie Borden does not need embellishment. The actual case already contains an ax murder, a destroyed dress, contradictory testimony, a sensational trial, family conflict, disputed evidence and an acquittal that has been argued about for 134 years. If you cannot make compelling television from that without importing speculative lesbian affairs and serial killers from the future, perhaps the problem is not Lizzie Borden.
Proceed with caution: Not because of the gore, but because somebody in your house is going to finish eight episodes believing half of this actually happened.
Jon Hamm and Giovanni Ribisi lead this dramatization of one of the strangest hostage crises in American history.
In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis kidnapped Indianapolis mortgage broker Richard “Dick” Hall, wired a sawed-off shotgun to his neck and demanded airtime to publicly air his grievances. Local radio journalist Fred Heckman suddenly found himself doing considerably more than reporting the story: he became part of it.
The eight-episode series explores the extraordinary 63-hour standoff and the relationship that developed between Kiritsis and Heckman as a journalist was forced to navigate a situation in which something said over the radio could have life-or-death consequences.
Just when you thought every conceivable piece of O.J. Simpson footage had been aired, somebody opens another cupboard. This four-part documentary revisits Juiced, Simpson’s bizarre 2006 hidden-camera prank show, using previously unseen footage and interviews to examine his post-trial attempt to turn notoriety into entertainment. The result looks less like another Simpson murder documentary and more like an examination of celebrity culture after infamy. Which may somehow be even stranger.
Kara Robinson Chamberlain’s unsolved-case series continues through September with three especially compelling investigations. Liz Barraza was shot outside her Texas home in 2019 while preparing for a garage sale, with the disguised killer captured on surveillance footage. Amy Wroe Bechtel disappeared while running in Wyoming in 1997. Firefighter Brandy Hall vanished in Florida in 2006 before her truck was discovered submerged in a pond with blood inside. All remain unsolved.
A&E’s survivor-driven series arrives on Netflix with 16 episodes built around people who encountered serial killers and lived. That shift in perspective matters. The killers are familiar. The people who escaped them usually aren’t.
A journalist and detective investigate a charismatic man linked to decades of suspicious deaths and failed marriages. Produced by Chris Smith, whose credits include Tiger King, the feature follows an approximately 30-year trail and the investigators attempting to reconstruct it. September apparently wasn’t content with one disturbing spouse.
A timely companion to our Tupac coverage, this recent series follows the criminal case surrounding his killing, examining the evidence, legal arguments and developments in the prosecution arising almost three decades after the Las Vegas shooting.
For the wider story of Tupac himself, FX’s Dear Mama remains essential viewing, but Burden of Proof is the one to choose if your interest is specifically the murder investigation.
Read our coverage:
The four-part documentary traces Combs’ rise through Bad Boy Entertainment before turning toward the allegations, criminal investigation, trial and conviction that transformed one of hip-hop’s most powerful figures into a convicted offender.
The series also spends considerable time on the wider Bad Boy world, including questions surrounding the East Coast-West Coast feud and Tupac Shakur’s killing.
Read our coverage:
The real man behind one of Casino’s most unforgettable characters.
This episode follows Spilotro from Chicago mob enforcer to the Outfit’s man in Las Vegas, where his increasingly reckless violence eventually made him a liability not only to the FBI’s investigation but to his own organization.
Read our coverage:
If you’re going to understand Lucky Luciano, start with the machine he helped build.
The series traces Luciano’s rise alongside Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, the Castellammarese War a…
