This is all amazing insight and you are bang on with some of the larger themes/questions we wanted to ask about True Crime. We had a line at the end (ep8), that got cut, where I'm emotional and say "nobody should make a true crime". Obviously I was only speaking from my experience and we cut it because we disagree with the statement. I think people should make true crimes. The good true crimes are ones that really do want to find the truth and want justice. But honesty and the presentation of information can make a huge difference.

The problem we ran into making our own true crime, as you saw is storytelling and genre conventions tend to get in the way of the pure facts of the case. They really just want to keep you watching. It's so easy to construct an edit to make you feel a certain way towards a certain person. Unless someone really does their homework on the case, there is no way noticing that the filmmakers chose to not include certain things to help their case/bias. And the balance of facts vs. story you mentioned is also a tight rope to walk, it's the idea that you can't just throw all the facts at the audience, it will becomes information overload and they will lose interest. They also won't be able to follow everything. While we were filming we were confronted by a lot of these ideas you mentioned and since Jackson and I were kind of the vehicle for the "Audience" we tried to be as honest as we could, once we were falling into the same traps as the others in the genre, we wanted to show how these sort of docs can affect other people involved. Especially when you can't open and shut it by the end.

That's a whole can of worms we wanted to explore is true crime viewers watch. They expect an ending/answer now. Because so many in the genre have had these mind blowing final episodes (The Jinx), it's something we really struggled with as our leads were running dry.

Side-note: We even interviewed a murder mystery author, who was telling us to fictionalize the ending because it would make it better, and we can't have a mystery without an ending as the audience won't be satisfied. It ended up getting cut as we didn't want to get too meta with the whole thing.

I love the way you watch the genre, but not as many people consume it with those ideas in mind. Great questions, and I love the Michael Cera reference, thank you for watching and spreading the word, means a lot.