Why we dramatize history — and why we should stop

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had watched the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. That interview, yes — the one with all the sweating and the pizza in Woking, in which he definitely didn’t meet Virginia Roberts Giuffre but he did single-handedly crash his reputation, and Emily Maitlis, like the Medusa of journalism she has since become, just let him tie his own noose.

Of course I’ve watched it. I’m a journalist. And a twenty-first-century citizen. Who hasn’t? My friend, for one, though she pointed out that she can just watch the three-part Amazon dramatization of the whole affair, A Very Royal Scandal, which is even juicier than the interview. (“I’m the son of the sovereign,” bellows the Duke of York, played by a soapy Michael Sheen. “If I want to go on telly and defend myself, I will.”)

She has, in fact, several ways of watching a second-hand version of events: there’s Netflix’s Scoop, based on Newsnight producer Sam McAlister’s autobiography (also released this year) and the CBC documentary Secrets of Prince Andrew. Or she could stream Channel 4’s Prince Andrew: The Musical, “an all-singing, all-dancing reimagining of the Duke of York’s very public fall from grace,” trills the ad.

Such is the eccentricity of our entertainment-munching world. We gobble up any salacious story or divisive figure — any public figure, for that matter — and run it through the Amazon/Netflix/Disney/Hulu machine. And out plops a glossy, gossipy, mincing drama guaranteed to rake in the big bucks because we are obsessed, it turns out, with dramatizing recent history. (That Emily Maitlis was executive producer on one of those dramatizations cannot be because of an earnest belief that the subject bears just one more study.)

The same logic applies to Hollywood’s current fixation on biopics, such as the recent or upcoming films about Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, Amy Winehouse and — that most uncharted of territory — the Beatles (Sir Sam Mendes is planning four separate films on them). And it goes for our morbid obsession with true crime, too: the patient zero of the genre, Serial, a podcast series about high-school student Hae Min Lee’s murder and her boyfriend’s conviction, won every award imaginable. And the recent Netflix drama on the Menendez brothers, Erik and Lyle, who were sentenced to life without parole for the 1989 murder of their parents, has captured the American psyche, too (there is also a documentary). The story is ongoing: on October 24 last year an LA district attorney announced that the case would be resentenced.

The trailer for Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story bleats that it is “based on the horrific true events” — and we lap it up like milk. We love to be shocked. We delight in the cozy knowledge on a Sunday evening that the Menendez brothers really did murder their parents — a feeling of acute schadenfreude, really. Perhaps we have always loved being shocked (think of the Greek tragedies or Shakespeare) but rather than Medea or Caesar, the players here are real; the action unfolding as it plays.

The case of Anna Delvey, the con artist and “fake heiress” who duped the cream of New York high society, has been hashed and rehashed again, most recently in the Netflix drama Inventing Anna, the disclaimer of which enigmatically declares: “This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.” This is riffing on the sense of the artificial which is baked into Anna’s story, of course, but it’s also testament to a genre which slips unsteadily between fact and fiction (Anna has herself cashed in by releasing a podcast about her story, The Anna Delvey Show; she was released on bail two years ago).

It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when filmmakers would graciously wait a while before slapping something on the big screen (the world wars or the Holocaust; biopics; scandals). Now, I can imagine a world in which Timothée Chalamet and Margot Robbie star in a dramatization of the assassination of John F. Kennedy — and they wouldn’t wait a decade after the event to do it.

Take Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s recent biopic of Donald Trump, The Apprentice, which dramatizes the early years of Trump’s business career. Has there ever been a film made about a president running for office during a campaign? And, in the same year — America’s most important in modern history — a dystopia which fleshes out what could happen if America fell to civil war?

“Inspired” by real events, The Apprentice was so on the nose — it was released a few weeks before the election — that the former president’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the producers in an attempt to block its premiere in America. Like A Very Royal Scandal, which depicts the Duke of York profusely swearing (not sweating) and prancing around Buckingham Palace, barking at his courtiers to “fuck off,” The Apprentice is a warts-and-all impression of Trump, who is depicted popping diet pills, sexually assaulting his wife, the late Ivana, and getting a scalp reduction to get rid of his bald spots (the final two were mentioned in Ivana’s divorce deposition though Trump has denied any wrongdoing). “This garbage is pure fiction,” said Trump’s spokesperson, “which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”

Trump may or may not have done these things. The Duke of York may or may not have a sweating problem. The point, I think, is not about getting to the heart of such matters — leave that to a court of law. It’s that we feel the need to fictionalize these things in the first place, sustaining an exhausting ritual of public interrogation. (Interestingly, this bleeds into our appetite for filming events such as the Heard v. Depp trial, which was livestreamed to millions of viewers and had a direct effect on the case itself, or for documenting ordinary goings-on in the street. Nowadays, anyone is a filmmaker or a journalist.)

So why does it matter, this sensationalizing of current history? One point is that it’s just a bit lazy. These aren’t new stories, they’re a revisiting of territory that has been plowed over and over again.

The more serious point is that such dramas can have real-world impact, in some cases positively. The podcast Serial had such an effect that in 2022 a judge overturned boyfriend Adnan Syed’s conviction, and he was released from prison. (His conviction was reinstated after the state of Maryland appealed; no word on another podcast series so far.) Mr Bates vs the Post Office, ITV’s based-on-fact account of how a group of British postmasters were accused of embezzling money when it turned out to be a matter of a faulty computer program, did more to shake up the rusty establishment than any news coverage or public campaign, because people were given license to empathize. In just a week millions were moved to sign a petition on behalf of the victims, and the government introduced a new law to exonerate and compensate them.

Yet these are the exceptions, and it is dangerous ground. The producers of The Apprentice have argued that it’s not political — Trump called it a “political hatchet job” — but it was so close to the election that it’s difficult to argue that it didn’t have an impact, whatever one’s political beliefs. Jeremy Strong, the Succession star who played Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, perhaps put it best: “In some small way, I think it could move the needle on how people feel [about] or perceive him.”

So why are we doing it — and demanding it? Maybe it’s because we can. We live in an age of instant gratification and quick-fire entertainment (TikTok videos, bingeing whole television series through the introduction of instant streaming, twenty-four-hour news bulletins), and this is television’s way of responding to that culture of immediacy. There’s the technology (and the appetite) to churn out mindless rubbish day in day out, even if it’s shooting through the same hoop.

Another is that in a world increasingly removed from reality — our lives unfurl on social media like never-ending soap operas — we are perhaps craving a measure of “authenticity”: rather than watch pure fiction (The Blair Witch Project) we want to see something real (Jeffrey Dahmer). And rather than endless romcoms, these days in short supply, we want to watch reality television shows about falling in love (First Dates, Married at First Sight, Love is Blind, Love Island, the list goes on).

Yet this melding of truth and fiction is both culturally limiting — imagination is the bread and butter of what it is to be human — and the kind of dangerous terrain which breeds conspiracy theories and fake news. And, frankly, I’d rather see something new than something old — again, and again and again.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2025 World edition.