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These days, over 5 million YouTube subscribers tune in to watch Soo explain in great detail, for one or two hours, a real true-crime case, including the Combs trial—an amount big enough that Soo has unseated Joe Rogan as the top podcast on YouTube.

These five projects — a combination of celebrity portraits, true-crime thrillers and oddball sagas — suggest the breadth of HBO Documentary Films’ strategy for an art form that has blossomed on the small screen.

O’Hara is obsessed with true-crime shows like “48 Hours,” in which culprits stick to their stories of innocence even when faced with video replays of their guilt, so he built the second act of his production in a moody, film-noir, flashback style, with a detective questioning characters after the play’s end-of-show massacre.

Villarreal: So the actors portray Erik and Lyle Menendez, respectively, in the Netflix true-crime series “Monsters,” the Erik and Lyle Menendez story.

And when executives at A&E went looking for a true-crime series in 2024, they came up with “Murder at the Motel,” which covered a killing at a different motel in every episode.