Planet Recommends · True Crime
Cold Cases, Warm Reporting
True crime that treats the people in it as people. Our editors' antidote to the genre's worst habits.
By Marisa Okonjo · 3 Aug 2026
True crime has a reputation problem, and it earned most of it. The shows on this list are the counter-argument: reported over years, careful with the families, honest about what they don't know.
If you have avoided the genre because it felt ghoulish, this is the door in. If you already live here, these are the ones to hold the rest up against.
01 · True Crime
Criminal
The quietest show in the genre and, twelve years on, still the most humane.
Latest · How a Volcanic Eruption Led to a Criminal Trial · 28 min
02 · True Crime
Casefile True Crime
Archival rigour and an anonymous narrator who never once reaches for melodrama.
Latest · Casefile Extra: Maria Cruz · 58 min
03 · True Crime
The Deck
One card, one unsolved case. A brilliantly simple structure that puts victims first.
Latest · Daniel Traina (8 of Diamonds, Florida) · 39 min
04 · True Crime
Park Predators
Wilderness cases told with real geography — you can feel the trailhead.
Latest · The Party · 28 min
05 · True Crime
Dateline NBC
The old master. Decades of tape and a narrator who knows exactly when to stop talking.
Latest · Talking Dateline: Suspicion in Silver City · 30 min