[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Jen, what makes crime drama so popular?
Jennifer Dornbush, Screenwriter, Author, Speaker, Consultant, and Forensic Science Specialist: Crime drama has been popular since the beginning of time since Cain and Abel, the very first murder. I have lots of theories on why it’s so popular. I think that one theory is that in our daily lives we encounter a lot of mystery. I know in my life there’s a lot of unexplained things whether it’s relational things or things from my past or questions that I have, there’s just always mystery. Especially as modern humans, we’re not comfortable with mystery anymore, we want answers for everything, we want everything to make sense but in real life it doesn’t. There’s a lot of mystery that we deal with in real life. Crime dramas give us the opportunity to explore mystery and solve it so at the end of the day the mystery has been solved, there’s that catharsis in like I’ve got the answers. It was figured out.
One other reason I think crime dramas are so popular is because I believe we have this innate sense of justice and redemption that we’re born with that we want to see justice, we want things to be redeemed that are are unfair or that are unjust, we want to see chaos ordered, there’s a lot of chaos in the world. We just have this innate desire to see all of that ordered and the wrongs righted and justice. Again, we don’t always get to see that every day in our real lives. We live sometimes in chaotic situations or bad things happen that don’t always get redeemed. But in crime dramas chaos is ordered and the wrongs are righted. We get justice, we get that redemption in that world and I think it gives us a really great catharsis.
Film Courage: Why do you think some stories are more popular than others? I’m thinking of like the Black Dahlia, where over time every generation seems to be interested in [the story]?
Jen: Weirdly right, we have this fascination with sort of the grotesque and the unusual and the barbaric honestly. Look at Dahmer (Jeffrey Dahmer) and now the popularity of that whole series and the Black Dahlia is a classic case of that, too. I don’t know, I think that’s just kind of innate to who we are and as humans…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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BIO:
Jennifer Dornbush is a screenwriter, author, speaker, consultant, and forensic science specialist. Jennifer grew up around the forensic world as the daughter of a medical examiner whose office was located in her home. She has been teaching and script consulting since 1997 and regularly leads seminars and workshops on screenwriting basics, writing for Hollywood, crime fiction, forensics, death investigation, and the creative life.
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