The new podcast series “Killer Role,” from the long-running TV newsmagazine “Dateline NBC,” begins—as we would hope—with lugubrious pizzazz. “The Siskiyou mountain range of southwestern Oregon is a land of misty peaks and deep gorges, dirt roads that lead to nowhere,” its host, Keith Morrison, says, in sonorous, buttery tones. Soft acoustic guitar ambles in; Morrison describes “thick and rain-drenched forests” and myths “as persistent as the rain.” “Dateline” has five correspondents, and Morrison, seventy-three, is perhaps its most iconic: tall, white-haired, genteel, and abundantly expressive, with a manner at once entirely showbiz and entirely sincere. His introductions, which are particularly cinematic, often guide us to scenic American communities with danger lurking in the shadows. Here, a 911 call is heard: a gun has gone off and a woman is in trouble. “Oh, yes,” Morrison purrs. “A lot of trouble, which you’ll hear about soon enough. But not quite yet. Best to hear a story first. . . . a tale at once unbelievable and absolutely true.”
“Dateline” is all about story; it often comes right out and says so, then reminds you again. In his previous “Dateline” podcast series “Mommy Doomsday,” which concluded in March, Morrison says, “This story is about a woman—about people around her dropping like flies. It’s about a fringe religious group. It’s about the end of the world. . . . and zombies. It’s about lazy beaches in Kauai, the desert of Arizona, a frostbitten pet cemetery.” On TV, and in podcasts, “Dateline” values narrative convention almost to the extent of a genre novel, and “Killer Role,” about an actress who plays a killer in a low-budget film and is then revealed to be a killer herself, could be said to be the ur-“Dateline” product: a murder story about a murder story within a murder story. It’s a bit like “Hamlet” that way.
“Dateline” began in 1992, and—though it’ll occasionally surprise you with an episode about the hunt for El Chapo or the race for the COVID vaccine—it has long focussed on true crime, and not the dreary kind. It airs on NBC primetime Friday and some Saturday nights, and, when you tune in, you’re expecting something like what it reliably delivers: a young woman who disappears after a Halloween party, a luxury-car dealer murdered in his bed. Perhaps relatedly, “Dateline,” in its great many forms—primetime, gratuitous syndication, streaming, and podcasts—is, for an exceptionally conventional network series, almost startlingly popular. Recently, two of the highest-charting podcast series have been from “Dateline”: “Killer Role” reached No. 2 on Apple, and “Dateline NBC” is regularly a top-ten true-crime series on Spotify. “Dateline” isn’t cool, exactly—it walks a fine line between stodginess and entertainment—but it’s somehow a mainstream stalwart and a cult favorite at once. (Bill Hader’s love of “Dateline” is well documented, from his over-the-top Morrison impression to his uncanny, hilarious Josh Mankiewicz; Twitter users post fan art and other tributes.) And it stands out for a reason.
On TV, where vérité true crime and murder dramas abound, “Dateline,” whose stories are often equally disturbing, takes care to respect the viewer, and also the subjects. It’s comforting because it has a certain gentleness; its format seems to wrap the hard stuff in several layers of bubble wrap. There’s an intro with a sturdy NBC anchor (“I’m Lester Holt”), and another intro from one of the correspondents; that wistful scene-setting, of which Morrison’s is reliably the most poetic, swiftly whisks us off to somewhere intriguing. The tragedy is explained with plainspoken drama that stops just short of lurid. The victim is introduced with images and remembrances from loved ones, and is often described as both an individual and a type: a “girly girl” or a “tomboy,” a dad who is also a “Mr. Mom,” a person whose smile would light up a room. The correspondents, some near-comically telegenic, are good listeners; the camera alternates between interviewer and interviewee, emphasizing empathetic connection. The correspondents often seem in synch with the victim’s loved ones—even to the extent of suggesting phrases that the interviewee repeats, nodding along. (This happens so much that I began recording it, in fascination. “Daddy’s girl?” “Daddy’s girl.” “Somebody’s gotta pay?” “Somebody’s got to pay.” “Could Tammy sell anything?” “She could sell anything.”)
And then there’s the story, which unfolds like a standard mystery: seeds of detail, gathering evidence, a potential suspect, a twist (“a dark suspicion wafted through the corridors of that old chocolate factory”), and so on, until we arrive at a graceful coda of life carrying on for those left behind. But the show’s takeaways can be unexpected. In the mostly middle-class, mostly white world that it’s often set in, more than one husband has pushed his wife off a cliff and made it look like an accident; more than one Christian has murdered a spouse to avoid the shame of divorce; more than one murderer has sent deceitful texts from the victim’s phone. Incredulity is heard over and over again: she’s never late for work. She would never not pick up her kids after school. She would never disappear and send a bunch of all-caps texts saying, Leave me alone, I’m on vacation. We see themes and beats and emotions recur; only the details are different. Every episode provides a strange combination of discomfort and solace, even as it flirts with camp. “Dateline” is full of clichés that remind us of another cliché: clichés are often clichés because they’re true.
“Dateline” also does many of the things that newer, and critically acclaimed, true-crime series such as “Serial” and “Making a Murderer” do—expose injustices caused by coerced false confessions, follow cold cases and investigate leads for years, focus on the victims more than the perpetrators. But its success, I suspect, has as much to do with its old-fashioned style. In the podcast landscape—a realm whose success has been driven in part by investigative true crime with a folksy aesthetic—“Dateline” ’s on-the-nose storytelling truly stands out. It doesn’t make the narrator a central character, it presumes a newscaster’s narrative authority, and it avoids the digressions germane to many deep-dive investigative podcasts (the moments when, as David Carr once memorably put it, a thread “would just sort of peter out and you’d go, ‘Huh!’ ”).
Keith Morrison stands out, too. He seems to revel in the form, and we, in turn, revel in him; his podcast series, including “Killer Role,” feel like a chance to float around in the warm bath of his voice. In “Killer Role,” he zooms in to those misty Siskiyou mountains to tell us of a father-daughter moviemaking team, a mysterious starlet named Wyn, and her uncannily believable performance in their horror movie. The story that unfurls is not a whodunnit but a whydunnit; as the episodes progress, we home in on a domestic drama (“It’s a story of family. . . . and how love, like money, is not always boundless”), interesting themes about performance, and a chaotic moment of violence witnessed by—of all people—a notary. It’s a fine tale, and a well-told one, even if its least appealing characters quickly take center stage. But, ah, no matter, as Morrison might say: we’re here for the “Dateline”-iness of it all. “Homicide detectives are, in a way . . . storytellers,” he says in the final episode, nearly singing. “Take a confusing jumble of facts, plot points like ballistics, blood spatter, witness statements; form them into a comprehensive narrative: beginning, middle, and end.” In a year when so little has made sense, and so little has felt resolvable, the lure of a beginning, middle, and end—even the presumption of one, delivered in a movie-trailer baritone—is powerful, and as persistent as the Siskiyou mountain rain.
