I liked true crime before. Then some kind of supersaturation occurred. I started to think how angry I would be if one of my friends was murdered and a couple of months later is considered live entertainment with royalty free horror music in the background. If you are remembered at all as anything other than a massacred torso, then it becomes like a flat, perfectly tidy portrait photo and some old high school buddy saying that you were "so full of life".

Then there are those who look at true crime in a completely different way. Which becomes obsessed with the idea that unsolved cases should be cleared up to bring victims to justice. One such person was Michelle McNamara. She was a writer and ran a popular true crime blog, snowing in on a serial rapist and murderer who ravaged California in the 1970s and 1980s.

The "Golden State Killer", an alias McNamara coined, had received much less public attention than other notorious serial killers such as "The Zodiac Killer" and "The Night Stalker" until she wrote an article on the case for Los Angeles magazine.

She was convinced that the private intelligence of the private teams, the police investigators who did not give up and the development of DNA technology would lead to the murderer being arrested. She got it right, but didn't get to experience when the real identity of the killer was revealed. 

The documentary snack I'll be gone in the dark , based on Michelle McNamara's book, is about the people who devoted their lives, either professionally or leisure, to trying to solve the riddle behind the infamous killer. It is also about his surviving victims, who are portrayed as both dignified and arresting. But most of it is about Michelle McNamara herself and how the book the series is based on.

It is a moving portrait, but unfortunately that part of the story takes up too much space. The reverence for the prematurely departed writer has meant that a story that could have been made into a dense 1.5 hour docudrama, now instead is six hours. And it is no coincidence that the true crime genre exploded in the pod format rather than on television. It's six hours of the same pictures. The same slow-motion reports, the same doors, corridors, computer keyboard buttons, and the same timeline graphics.

The streaming services' desire to retain the audience for as long as possible has led to eternally long formats that the content doesn't hold for - and it's a shame for an exciting killer hunt with heart and ethics like this.