True crime narratives can be very, very entertaining. But the compulsion to binge watch, listen or read about the lurid details of real-life brutality raises obvious ethical concerns. After all, the victims in these stories were often subjected to unspeakable horrors which their loved ones never imagined might one day be transformed into a pop culture phenomenon. As most true-crime devotees will admit, no small part of the genre’s intrigue boils down to voyeurism — there is something undeniably gripping about exploring the psyches of people driven to do depraved things in suspenseful detail.
But voyeurism alone isn’t enough, which is where two recent examinations of Ted Bundy miss the mark: They cater to voyeurism with no higher purpose. The Netflix docuseries “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” and the biopic “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” (staring a studly Zac Efron, no less) each dive head-first into Bundy’s heinous kidnappings and murder of some 30 young women, with little justification for doing so. There is simply no good reason to re-explore the brutality of Bundy — and even less to humanize him.