The Murder Years

It’s… fine. Just fine. Only fine. Definitely reads like a true crime story, so if you’re big into true crime, you may like this. The one thing I struggled with was that there seem to be no point - the premise of season 1 and there possibly being some sort of curse or reason for so many unconnected murders was really interesting, but they never followed through with it. Season 2 wasn’t at all related to season 1, which felt a little disjointed. Decent enough for background listening, but definitely nothing revolutionary. Also a truly ungodly amount of ads!! I think it’s 3min of ads for every 5-7min of content! Everything iHeart puts out right now feels like such a cheap cash grab, it’s annoying. You can feel that no heart was put into the writing and their podcasts are just vessels for collecting ad money.

This might be the worst fiction podcast I’ve ever listened to. There’s a hint of an overall story, and episode 8 supposedly ties it together. Instead it’s a waste of dead ends and wasted time. The “true crime” segments are ok, but way over produced, and we don’t need to hear every line repeated. So much potential. I hope whoever at iHeart who greenlit this gets whatever blackmail the writers of this show have on you. Whatever you did can’t be that bad. Don’t waste your time.

I don't want to call this terrible because I think it could be worse and I think it has a decent premise but the writing for the dialogue and acting is so bad it just reminds you the entire time that it not the true story it is trying to seem like.

I was intrigued by this story, as it seemed to imply that the separate series of murders would all be tied together somehow. Spoiler: they weren’t. The closest the show came to tying everything together was falling back on that tired, racist trope of “well the town is built on a Native American burial ground, so maybe that had something to do with it” such a disappointing ending to a show with promise.