How the Creators of ‘Evil Lives Here’ Make the Most Empathetic True Crime Series on Television
Over the course of 15 seasons and 136 episodes (and counting), the Investigation Discovery series “Evil Lives Here” has evolved into one of the most surprisingly thoughtful unscripted shows on television — a true crime program that eschews cliche and sensationalism in favor of profound empathy and psychological insight. The premise is simple: It’s a POV interview series in which horrific crimes are explored from the perspective of those closest to the perpetrators — spouses, parents, children, friends, etc. — who recount the trauma of discovering the truth about their loved ones. What distinguishes “Evil Lives Here” from other true crime series is not only its move away from the binary focus on monsters and victims but the sensitivity of its interviews and the subtlety of its recreations. Nuance is not a word one often thinks of when it comes to true crime, but “Evil Lives Here” is rich in it.
According to ID development and production executive Winona Meringolo, this more complex approach was baked into the series from the beginning. “People talk about proximity to evil a lot, right? They talk about survivor shows. They talk about victims. And the way we thought about it was, there are a lot of different perspectives about victims,” Meringolo told IndieWire. “There’s the question that I think a lot of people aren’t faced with, and that is what would you do as a family member when faced with the fact that your loved one has committed a terrible act, something that you believe to be heinous and unforgivable? A lot of the time, these family members turn their loved ones in. They’re a victim, a different kind of victim, and what we were finding is that those stories weren’t being shown on television.”
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In 2016, ID brought on executive producer Kevin Fitzpatrick of Red Marble Media to produce a show focusing on these loved ones, and he began to hone in on a methodology. “The idea was to talk to the family members of murderers in a respectful and intimate and non-sensational way,” Fitzpatrick told IndieWire. “One of the things we talked about early on was making the show about moments of decision. A lot of these people are presented with incredibly uncomfortable decisions, and you start to learn that people give others the benefit of the doubt for all kinds of reasons. We all do it all the time. And you live with those ramifications. When we started putting the show together, I said we need to live in as many moments of decision as possible, and they could seem particularly small. They are moments where you decide whether you’re going to do something or you’re not, and if you don’t, it starts to snowball.”
Fitzpatrick noted that one such moment of decision is often the decision to appear on the show itself. “There’s a lot of conversation, and we’re not invasive — if someone doesn’t want to do the interview, we don’t want them to do the interview,” Fitzpatrick said. Typically, the show’s staff finds its topics via both extensive research and responding to people on social media who alert them to potential stories, and then the process of approaching interviewees begins. “We have people here, the only thing they do is book stories. They go and do interviews, they send out letters, they follow up with phone calls. Sometimes people are in right away, sometimes it takes months. We’ve had stories where it took years. It’s all about the person reaching the comfort level where they’re ready to talk.”
That kind of patience is key to the show’s consistency, and it extends to every aspect of the process. “We take our time, we don’t want people to feel rushed,” Fitzpatrick said, “and there’s a rule on the set that if there’s a technical problem, the crew never stops the interview — they keep rolling. I’m not going to interrupt someone telling me about one of the most difficult things in their life because there’s a slight buzz on the microphone.” Another area where the show takes its time is in the reenactments, which often contain delicate material involving child actors. “When you’re working with a kid, you have to plan on not a lot of scenes that day, and you have to block the scenes so that the kid is not going to be involved in a violent act. You have to take it slow and make sure that the kids are comfortable.”
The reenactments on “Evil Lives Here” are, in keeping with the show’s overall sensibility, less heightened and artificial than other true crime shows, and that’s partly thanks to Fitzpatrick’s “less is more” attitude. “The greatest compliment we can get for the recreations is if nobody comments on them,” he said. “It’s a POV interview show, and the recreations are only there to help articulate some of the things that we can’t see or to help the audience understand the story point that this person is telling us. So you want very few sound-ups, you don’t want actors talking whenever possible. You don’t want to design scenes based around the recreations giving you story information, unless you have to for some particular reason. They’re just supposed to be there to help articulate the story.”
The ideal for Fitzpatrick is that the show works, as much as possible, with just the interview material. “When we come back from the interview, somebody sits down and writes a transcript,” he said. “We string that all out, and we do a complete radio cut from start to finish before we shoot one frame of recreation. That way you know exactly what you’re shooting, and you don’t need to shoot one excess scene. And you’re not wondering how much time you need to fill in between this story beat and that story beat. You should be able to listen to ‘Evil Lives Here’ as basically a podcast. And if you understand it and it moves you, then you’re ready to add in the archive and the recreations.”
Although “Evil Lives Here” is currently in the middle of its 15th season, the show has never grown repetitive or predictable, something its creators attribute to the nature of relying on first-person narratives. “Each time you come into a new episode, you’re basically treating it like a new documentary,” Fitzpatrick said. “Each episode has new challenges and you have to have the discussions: Are they most comfortable in New Mexico? Do they want to come to New York? Do we meet them somewhere in the middle? What do we think their greatest fears are for the interview? What are we worried about? You can’t take anything for granted.”
“Each episode is like its own specialized film,” Meringolo said, adding that the show’s perspective has broadened in recent years with ambitious spinoffs like “Evil Lives Here: Shadows of Death” (which explores the intersections between various lives that have been touched by a crime) and “Evil Lives Here: The Killer Speaks” (which adds killers’ voices from prison interviews into the mix). “So now you’ve got a lot of ways that we approach the intimacy of crime and the people that are touched by crime. And we don’t want to be prescriptive because trauma is not prescriptive. We just want to continue the dialogue in terms of really being open to what stories come in.”
“Evil Lives Here” airs on Investigation Discovery (ID). All episodes can be streamed on Max.
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