The Next Trend In True Crime Is Terrible, And I Can't Stop Watching

The next terrible trend in true crime is coming around the bend, and it’s speeding toward a gold mine of scummy human beings. That gold mine is family vloggers gone wrong.

Already this year, we’ve seen two of these stories hit the small screen. First, there was An Update on Our Family, the saga of Myka and James Stauffer, who adopted a special needs toddler from China. The Stauffers generated a massive amount of content around their adoption journey and bringing home their son — only for their son to quietly vanish from the channel over time. Turns out they didn’t end up keeping the child … they just weren’t as vocal and public about that part.

An Update On Our Family is a tangled story told via the perspectives of other family vloggers, fans, adoptees, and adoptive parents. For a narrative about a voyeuristic YouTube shitshow, it’s assembled with a kind of care and sensitivity I wasn’t expecting, while not letting anybody off the hook.

The second and by far less morally gray of these stories was Devil in the Family, the by now much-told story of Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt is an unlicensed wellness counselor who operated a high-control (read: cultish) “therapy” practice that destroyed the lives of the couples she coached.

Oh, and she thinks she’s somehow heralding the Second Coming and that she needs to exorcise the demons out of young children by starving and tormenting those children, which is why she is now, thankfully, in prison for what should be a long time.

Franke was a wildly popular family YouTuber, giving neverending updates and insights into how she was raising her six children alongside her husband. Her journey is a horrific and transparent one in hindsight, a personal descent into a narrative that involved not only dubiously public parenting (read: children and their “problems” as content for an audience of hundreds of thousands) but a grandiose vision of herself as the absolute good.

Even Scamanda, the tale of Amanda Riley’s years-long con of soliciting money, gifts, and general adoration as she pretended to have cancer, falls into this category as well. Riley made her “cancer journey” very public-facing via her extensive blog, showcasing herself as a wife and parent along the way. It isn’t exactly family vlogging, but it follows the same principles: an apparently earnest and materially comfortable white woman builds a showcase out of her life for financial gain.

This proverbial gold mine of garbage humans fits a predictable pattern: these are pretty, married white women in upper-middle-class families (to begin with, then they make the vlogging/blogging/conning money). They have multiple children and perform traditional gender roles in their marriages, with a heavy valence of Christian faith. The word “Blessed” is used as a common catchphrase, a reassurance of baseline ideology.

What seemingly ordinary people! How happy! How white and comfortable and smiling! Never mind that this all packaged up as a digestible, aspirational “normal” is destructive in its own right. The appeal of family vlogging is, in large part, the parasocial relationship with the family, the audience positioned as confidantes and insiders. None of us are immune from this kind of self-positioning; your “relationship” with a favorite author, actor, singer, or podcaster—your sense of their emotional lives portrayed through art or interviews or conversation—is a much more normalized and accepted form of parasocial relationships. I know I laugh along with my regular podcasts. However, at least for me, it’s far more blatant and startling to observe the formula played out so nakedly and so invasively with children and their day-to-day lives as unconsenting stars.

I can’t possibly imagine that any more of these stories will catch the attention of the true-crime craze, especially as the first generation of family-vlogged children become adults and are finally able to speak for themselves.

There’s a timely appeal in these Oh no you don’t public shamings. It allows viewers to engage in the appealing fantasy that people who boldly and publicly behave badly, under the guise of all-American self-righteousness, will be held to account. Clearly, that’s not actually the world we live in. Though, as these stories also demonstrate, it’s way more popular to cast the woman in the story as the central villain, rather than figures like Amanda Riley’s husband.

Anyway, Ruby Franke’s daughter’s book came out this year.

An Update On Our Family is streaming on Max.

Devil in the Family and Scamanda are both streaming on Hulu.