Based on a True Story, review: an uproarious assault on shameless real-crime fanatics
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Exactly how funny can you make the graphic business of murder? Based on a True Story (Sky Max) opens with a scene of frenzied savagery that evokes Psycho. A young woman is stabbed by an intruder once, twice, three times… 10 times. Because this is the first scene, it’s not yet clear that hilarity is to follow. And yet killing – serial killing – turns out to be at the heart of an uproarious and fleet-footed assault on the growth industry of true crime.
The serial killer on the loose in southern California, it swiftly emerges, is handsome, charming plumber Matt (Tom Bateman). His guilt is first suspected by the Bartletts, whose leaky toilet he’s fixing. Nathan (Chris Messina) is a ho-hum tennis coach whose sole career highlight was beating Roger Federer. Ava (Kaley Cuoco) is a true-crime obsessive who hooks up with gal pals to talk murder.
On their uppers and expecting their first child, they plot to blackmail Tom into collaborating on a mega-hit podcast. “How’re you going to feel if the girl from Serial shows up?” Ava reasons to her doubting husband. The deal they make with Matt is no more murders, though naturally they soon lose control of the narrative.
The show is at its sharpest calling out the amoral, mercantilised obsession with true crime – “the great American art form”, it’s called here. The vapidities of Los Angeles and social media are easier targets but mercilessly hit by a script that’s well served by a cast with reliably funny bones.
At one point the Bartletts are horrified to discover their podcast has been “cancelled” by, among others, Judi Dench. A slyer celebrity gag is unspoken and perhaps accidental: the knife-wielding slayer is a dead ringer for Federer. (A chillier echo finds Tom Bateman and executive producer Jason Bateman, no relation, sharing a surname with Bret Easton Ellis’s most American of psychos, Patrick Bateman.)
Based on a True Story is a very guilty pleasure. Its closest comedic cousin is Barry, which required the viewer to be both appalled and entertained by contract killing. There the victims were male. Here they’re female, and young and beautiful. One is impaled on a parasol. Another is slashed in a fantasy sequence. The body of a third is dumped in a car boot. To lampoon true crime is to ape its enthusiasm for gore. Its worse crime is to terminate on an unsatisfying midpoint, with no resolution in sight.
