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Let’s whisper about it, but the bubble of the true-crime genre could have reached its peak. There are currently far more documentaries available than actual crimes being committed, and this is coming to life in strange ways. In the past (roughly a year and a half ago), the easiest strategy to pinpoint a horrible true crime docuseries was researching the crime on the internet. If the crime was more elaborate and interesting than what the docuseries was offering, then it was an indication that the docuseries was more suited to the length of a five-minute read on Wikipedia.
However, now that the true-crime industry is saturated, there is a different way. That is, look at the bottom of the Wikipedia page to see the number of other shows based on the same crime. Filmmakers are so busy fighting over very limited scraps that there are not many first-time crime stories being shown. There may have been a film based on it or a dramatized version. But unquestionably, there would have been other documentaries made and, conservatively, seven or eight hundred other podcasts.
Santa Claus, The Serial Killer (BBC Three) gives us its episodic account of the murders of young gay men in Toronto from 2010 – 2017. If you have been following the works of CBC, you might know about the 2017 documentary Murder in the Village. Or CBC’s Village of the Missing from 2019, The Detectives from 2020, and the movie Catching a Serial Killer Bruce McArthur made in 2021. Perhaps, you read the book by Justin Ling called Missing from the Village The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice and the System that Failed Torontos Queer Community published in 2020. Or maybe you are Supper and have a radio, in that case, you would have heard the episode from Verkligheten I P3 titled the murders published in 2021.
From this abundance of insights, you can learn two things. The first one is very interesting. The story told by Santa Claus the Serial Killer is both tragic and enraging. Between 2010 and 2017, eight men went missing from Church and Wellesley, Toronto’s gay district. Eventually, a 66-year-old gardener called Bruce McArthur was arrested. He was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty. It is believed that McArthur would have been apprehended much sooner, but the men that went missing were mostly gay and brown and their cases were sidelined due to the systemic racism and homophobia of the police.
The second thing is that Santa Claus the Serial Killer probably isn’t going to uncover much new information, and while it is well intended, it is missing the mark on plenty of fronts. This is right as long as the show does not try to present itself as an investigation of sorts rather than a retelling of information that already exists. Unfortunately, that is exactly what Santa Claus the Serial Killer does.
As Mobeen Azhar, a journalist who is noninclusive, puts it, he is usually in a better position than this. There is some rationale to Azhar’s appointment he is gay and Muslim which offers him more credibilty than, say, Stacey Dooley, but the audacity of pretending to solve the cases myself is beyond me. It is, in fact, unacceptable.
Azhar, like many of the talking heads in these documentaries, watches reports (which he has seen before) of other people. Then he goes on to monologue like he is Carrie from Homeland while gluing notes to a wall. To give his fake efforts more credibility, he darts around googling “Toronto Serial Killer, 2010-2017, using his mobile phone in a disinterested manner.
It is also surprisingly absent on his end. While in a cab to Toronto, the man tells the driver “Canada is like America, but has less bullshit,” to a rather aggressive silent reaction. Then, he goes to a scrap metal yard while constantly worrying about his rental car’s safety. His concluding remarks, after spending the first two hours of the series in an unrestricted airplane cabin, are more or less Jerry’s Final Thought. The lingering discomfort is hard to shake through the remaining parts of the series as well. At some points, it feels less of an investigation and more of a drive-by of the Bruce McArthur murder-themed attractions. These people have repeated their stories ad infinitum and something regrettably grotesque is in Azhar’s, and comes the audience’s, ready fascination with so much endless suffering. For those who are planning on wasting three hours, Santa Claus’s The Serial Killer is worth a glance. If not, do not worry by Easter, there will surely be a dozen more on the same theme.
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