SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy,” now streaming on Peacock. When Michael Chernus signed on to stand at the center of Peacock’s new anthology series “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy,” he wasn’t just landing another role. He was agreeing to be associated with one of the most vile, irredeemable killers in American …
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On streamers, serial killers are always hot commodities. Of the top 20 docs on Netflix in 2024, 15 were true crime; Ryan Murphy turned Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez brothers into juggernauts (and didn’t stop there); and Mindhunter had Redditors out-psychologizing the FBI. The danger in these re-enactments and dramatizations is obvious: Presenting sympathetic killers and violence as prestige TV …
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Nearly six full hours into Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy, we finally see the eponymous serial killer applying make-up and donning the clown costume that, for many viewers, is inextricably linked to Gacy’s murderous reign. The moment is striking and also, if I’m being completely honest, corny. It’s a wild reversal from the relative subtlety of the first …
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