ID and Discovery+ are going hard on 1990s nostalgia with their latest slate of true crime shows. That includes August specials on Biggie and Tupac, the Menendez Brothers, Mary Kay Letourneau, and Louise Woodward. Who Killed Biggie and Tupac? (a working title) will try to answer the mystery with a new round of interviews; Menendez Brothers: Misjudged? will consider the brothers convicted of killing their parents as potential abuse victims; Mary Kay Letourneau: Notes on a Scandal seeks to dive back into the story of the teacher who raped her 12-year-old student, Vili Fualauu, and later married him; and The Killer Nanny will reopen the evidence in the case against Louise Woodward for killing the 8-month-old child she was hired as an au pair for.
It’s all grisly business, dredging up the past, but the streaming network isn’t fully trapped in the decade of scrunchies and JNCO jeans. The most potentially explosive of their new specials, House of Hammer (another working title), stays achingly recent in its examination of Armie Hammer, whose fall from movie stardom and grace in 2021 involved affairs, drugs, and accusations of cannibalism. The show grounds that scandal in a century of Hammer family scandals, tracing the family with “a trove of archive and interviews from survivors and family members” to display “a dysfunctional dynasty with its male characters exhibiting all the devastating consequences of privilege gone wild.”
In October, they’ll launch another special aimed at another high profile, topical murder case with Gabby Petito: An ID Murder Mystery. These are the gruesome crown jewels in a true crime-heavy slate that promises tons of charming con artists, twisty tales of terrible acts, and shocking missing persons cases. Discovery+ is banking on viewers finishing the million hours of true crime podcasts they already have downloaded in order to tune in for more.
(Via Variety)