NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In 1989, Americans were captivated by the shotgun murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion by their own children. Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to life in prison and lost all subsequent appeals. But today, more than three decades later, they have an unexpected chance to get out.

Not because of how the legal system works. Because of the entertainment.

After two recent documentaries and a scripted drama about the pair brought new attention to the 35-year-old case, the Los Angeles district attorney recommended that they be convicted.

The popularity and proliferation of true crime entertainment such as the Netflix docudrama “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is effecting real-life changes for their subjects and society at large. At their best, podcasts, streaming series, and social media content can help expose injustices and right wrongs.

But because many of these products prioritize entertainment and profit, they can also have serious negative consequences.

It might help the Menendez brothers

Using true crime stories to sell a product has a long history in America, from the “penny press” tabloid newspapers of the mid-1800s to television movies like 1984’s “The Burning Bed.” These days there are podcasts, series Netflix bingeable and even true crime TikToks The fascination with the genre may be considered morbid by some, but it can be partially explained by the human desire to make sense of the world through stories.

In the case of the Menendez brothers, Lyle, then 21, and Erik, then 18, said they feared their parents were about to kill them to prevent disclosure of their father’s long-term sexual abuse on Erik. But at their trial, many of the allegations of sexual abuse were not allowed to be presented to the jury, and prosecutors argued that they committed murder simply to get their parents’ money.

For years, this is the story that many people who followed the saga from afar accepted and talked about.

The new dramas delve into the brothers’ childhoods, helping audiences better understand the context of the crime and thus see the world as a less scary place, says Adam Banner, a criminal attorney who writes a column on pop culture and the law for the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association.

“Not only does it make us feel better intrinsically,” says Banner, “but it also gives us the ability to think, ‘Well, now I can take this case and put it in a different bucket than another situation where I have no explanation and the only thing I can say is, “This kid must be bad.”

The rise of the anti-hero is at stake

Many true crimes of the past take particularly shocking crimes and explore them in depth, generally assuming that those convicted of the crime were in fact guilty and deserved to be punished.

The success of the “Serial” podcast, which called Adnan Syed’s murder conviction into question, spawned a newer genre that often assumes (and intends to prove) the opposite. The protagonists are innocent or, as in the case of the Menendez brothers, guilty but likable and therefore undeserving of harsh sentences.

“There’s a long tradition of journalists doing criminal cases and showing that people are potentially innocent,” says Maurice Chammah, a writer at The Marshall Project and author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.” ”

“But I think the curve goes up exponentially after ‘Serial,’ which was in 2014 and obviously changed the whole economic and cultural landscape of podcasts,” says Chammah. “And then ‘Making a Murderer’ came along a few years later and became kind of a huge docuseries example.”

Around the same time, the innocence movement gained traction along with the Black Lives Matter movement and increased attention to deaths in police custody. And in popular culture, both fiction and non-fiction, the trend is to explore the backstory of a villainous character.

“All these superheroes, super-villains, the ‘Joker’ movie — you’re just inundated with the idea that people’s bad behavior is shaped by trauma when they were younger,” Chammah said.

Banner often represents some of the least sympathetic defendants imaginable, including those accused of child sexual abuse. He says the effects of these cultural trends are real. Today’s juries are more likely to give their clients the benefit of the doubt and are more skeptical of police and prosecutors. But he also worries about today’s true crime heavy focus on cases gone wrong, which he says are outliers.

While the puzzle aspect of “Did they get it right?” may fuel our curiosity, he says, we risk sowing distrust in the entire criminal justice system.

“You don’t want to take away the positive ramifications that shedding light on a case can bring. But you also don’t want to give the impression that this is how our justice system works. That if we can get enough cameras and microphones in a case, then that’s how we’re going to save somebody from death row or that’s how we’re going to get life.”

Chammah adds: “If you open up sentencing decisions and second looks and criminal justice policy to pop culture — in the sense of who’s podcasting about them, who’s getting Kim Kardashian to talk about them — the risk of extreme arbitrariness is really high . … It seems like it’s only a matter of time before a defendant’s wealthy family basically funds a podcast trying to make a viral case for their innocence.”

Audience is also a factor

Whitney Phillips, who teaches a course on true crime and media ethics at the University of Oregon, says the genre’s popularity on social media adds another level of complication, often encouraging active viewer and listener participation.

“Because these are not trained detectives or people who have any real experience in forensics or even criminal law, then there is this really common result of the wrong people being implicated or suspected,” she says. “Also victims” families are now part of the discourse. They could be charged with this, that or the other, or at the very least, you have the killing of your loved one, the violent death, being entertainment for millions of strangers.”

This sensibility was both chronicled and critiqued in the comedy-drama series Only Murders in the Building, which follows three unlikely associates living in a New York apartment building where a murder has occurred. The trio decide to do a true crime podcast while simultaneously trying to solve the case.

Nothing about true crime is fundamentally unethical, Phillips says. “It’s that the social media system—the attention economy—is not calibrated for ethics. It’s calibrated for views, it’s calibrated for engagement, and it’s calibrated for sensationalism.”

Many influencers are now vying for the “crime audience,” Phillips says, with social media and more traditional media feeding off each other. The real crime is now creeping into lifestyle content and even makeup tutorials.

“It was kind of inevitable that you’d see those two things collide and that these influencers would literally put on a face of makeup and then say kind of — it’s very informal, it’s very cheesy, it’s often not very well researched. “, she says. “This is not investigative journalism.”