![]() Perhaps relatedly, “Dateline,” in its great many forms-primetime, gratuitous syndication, streaming, and podcasts-is, for an exceptionally conventional network series, almost startlingly popular. ![]() It airs on NBC primetime Friday and some Saturday nights, and, when you tune in, you’re expecting something like what it reliably delivers: a young woman who disappears after a Halloween party, a luxury-car dealer murdered in his bed. “Dateline” began in 1992, and-though it’ll occasionally surprise you with an episode about the hunt for El Chapo or the race for the COVID vaccine-it has long focussed on true crime, and not the dreary kind. It’s about lazy beaches in Kauai, the desert of Arizona, a frostbitten pet cemetery.” On TV, and in podcasts, “Dateline” values narrative convention almost to the extent of a genre novel, and “Killer Role,” about an actress who plays a killer in a low-budget film and is then revealed to be a killer herself, could be said to be the ur-“Dateline” product: a murder story about a murder story within a murder story. In his previous “Dateline” podcast series “Mommy Doomsday,” which concluded in March, Morrison says, “This story is about a woman-about people around her dropping like flies. “Dateline” is all about story it often comes right out and says so, then reminds you again. a tale at once unbelievable and absolutely true.” ![]() “A lot of trouble, which you’ll hear about soon enough. Here, a 911 call is heard: a gun has gone off and a woman is in trouble. His introductions, which are particularly cinematic, often guide us to scenic American communities with danger lurking in the shadows. Soft acoustic guitar ambles in Morrison describes “thick and rain-drenched forests” and myths “as persistent as the rain.” “Dateline” has five correspondents, and Morrison, seventy-three, is perhaps its most iconic: tall, white-haired, genteel, and abundantly expressive, with a manner at once entirely showbiz and entirely sincere. “The Siskiyou mountain range of southwestern Oregon is a land of misty peaks and deep gorges, dirt roads that lead to nowhere,” its host, Keith Morrison, says, in sonorous, buttery tones. The new podcast series “Killer Role,” from the long-running TV news magazine “Dateline NBC,” begins-as we would hope-with lugubrious pizzazz. ![]() Photograph by Patrick Randak / Courtesy NBC “Dateline” has five correspondents, and Keith Morrison, seventy-three, is perhaps its most iconic. ![]()
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