FirstLookTV’s Will Hanrahan

Factual producer FirstLookTV specializes in investigative series and is credited with a robust slate of titles for major streamers and channels, including Meet Marry Murder and My Lover My Killer. While the true-crime space has not been immune to the squeeze on production and advertising budgets, Will Hanrahan, co-founder and chief creative officer, shares with TV Real what sets FirstLookTV apart from the rest to help it meet the market’s challenges and demands, as well as ethical measures the studio takes, what the public interest around true crime is, the rise of short-form content and more.

TV REAL: True crime has had a stronghold on the factual market. What are some of the narrative techniques and USPs setting FirstLookTV’s content apart in this space?
HANRAHAN: What we’re trying to do at the moment is combine an immersive, emotional timeline or journey with the events of what has happened. We talk at our place about emotions—reading the stories, not events. You can rely on the fact that if it’s true crime, something bad has happened. We need to portray that one way or the other. But if we portray it with the facts and figures rather than the emotional immersion and the things that have happened to collateral damage victims, we feel that the viewing experience is less impactful. Also, it’s missing the point of the story because the story is about the people who have lived rather than the events that led to their deaths. We are quite unusual in that sense. We’ve had a lot of attention paid to us by the likes of Lifetime in the U.S. and in [the U.K.] by other female-facing channels. That’s what sets us apart from the rest; we’re emotions and feelings [focused] rather than simply stories and events.

TV REAL: What are some of the ethical considerations FirstLookTV has during the production process, and how does the company approach making content informative and awareness-raising rather than existing purely for entertainment?
HANRAHAN: For us, if true crime about real people’s lives falls into the entertainment category, that would be anathema, just completely the opposite of what we try to do. Every day, when we wake up and come to work, we ask ourselves: What’s the social purpose of what we’re doing? Why are we doing what we do? If the answer is to entertain folks, we would run a country mile. We’d go in the other direction because that’s demeaning to the individual who has been killed. If we’re doing a murder series, it’s disrespectful to those loved ones who are left behind. If you want to be in entertainment, go make entertainment shows with people who laugh and joke and smile. Make reality entertainment, studio entertainment. You’re in the wrong business if you’re telling real-life stories involving murders and you think it’s entertainment. We simply reject that notion tonally and editorially. Our tone is important to us and how we make our programs.

We often look at the evidence that is sent to us by investigating detectives in American stories, and we [say to] ourselves, Yes, we’ve got great access to this evidence that was put before a court, but are we being voyeuristic in how we use that evidence? Are we actually just being titillated by seeing a shot of a dead body or an evidence shot of a crime scene? If that’s the case, we hate showing it. We won’t show it. And we’ve had discussions in the past, particularly with our American detective colleagues, where we’ve asked that they don’t send too much evidence that could be upsetting to our crew. We don’t want producers or our researchers to open a file that shocks them, makes them feel psychologically ill or in some way upsets them. In that case, what would it do to the viewer? We are very cautious in our tone, and we’re very determined to be respectful to the person who has lost their life. We’re absolutely determined to respect what families want us to say about their stories.

Justice must not only be done; justice must be seen to be done because it contributes to stopping crime. If you, as a potential wrongdoer, know that you may face the death penalty or spend a lifetime in prison, there’s a moment where you might think, I’m not going to do this. If we can help prevent crime, then that’s what justice being seen to be done is all about. Also, we need to believe in the justice system. As citizens, if we felt there was no hope of being avenged from the victims of the crimes that sometimes we are victims of, there would be anarchy. We have to believe in the justice system. In that sense, the justice system being seen to be done is part of what we want to talk about.

That sometimes means that we tell stories that family members may not want us to tell. We have to ask ourselves, Well, what’s the public interest in? Is the public interest in telling this story so others are armed, educated and informed? Or is the public interest in serving the needs of the family members? It’s a delicate balance, but that does sometimes mean we make that bold decision. We’re going to tell the story because we think it’s important. It brings me all the way back to what I said at the very start: If we’re not purposeful or if we’re just about entertainment, I don’t think we’re important.

TV REAL: How are you navigating creative differences when producing across territories and what sells in different markets? What can producers access in different regions, and how does that affect the way certain stories are told?
HANRAHAN: You have to be so on your game and sharp when you’re pitching into the American market. There’s a lot of competition and a lot of people trying to tell stories. Podcasts have become a major rival to TV programs and to streaming content. You’re up against a lot of rivals, a lot of competition. So, how do you meet that challenge? The answer is you have to be not necessarily bigger, but you have to be special. What is special about what you’re saying?

In our Lifetime series Meet Marry Murder, what was special about us is we were taking this simple and rather awful fact head-on: Of all women killed, 50 percent will have slept with the person who killed them. How do you take that fact, which we’ve all known for a long time, and make it distinguishable in a series like Meet Marry Murder? And the answer is, we’re telling a story about what could happen to you in your home. We’re telling a story about somebody who could have been your mom, your dad, your neighbor. Relatability with your life, rather than exceptionalism, is something that we’ve tried to achieve in our content in the United States. We often find our colleagues in the U.S. who work in Britain will look for something exceptional—a wild story. Look, we’re interested in wild stories, but I’m more interested in relatable stories, which means I’m more interested in something that happened in somebody’s home or car than I am in serial killers who’ve done monstrous things. I think that sets us apart a wee bit in America.

Around the rest of the world, American crime travels. There is a compelling nature to what happens in America for the whole world to watch. If I pitch up with a series to Germany and say, I’ve got a ten-part series called My Lover My Killer, they will instantly say, Are there any German cases? And then they will say, Is it all British? And if I say, Well, we have one German case and five American cases, they will buy that series. If I say, We have one German case and nine British cases, they will say they won’t. American stories sell. When we take our content to market, we know whether it’s Germany, Australia, South Africa, India or Latin America, they will want to know things that have happened in the States. It is weird, really. They’re more interested in America sometimes than they are in Germany. Indeed, our series in the U.K. often rate higher if they have American stories as well as British stories than not. If somebody can explain that to me, I’d love to know. In the meantime, I’m just answering the market’s needs.

TV REAL: Why are we seeing a rise in production companies venturing into short-form and audio true-crime content? What place does short-form and audio content have in the market going forward?
HANRAHAN: We are launching a 52-part podcast series this year because we are looking with jealousy at the stories that are being told in audio, and we are demanding of ourselves that we join that crowd. Audio is incredibly impactful. We’re brought up listening to stories from our mother and father’s lap when they read stories to us from a book at bedtime. We’ve always listened, and sound has such an evocative quality. You can hear the sound of a glass smash and it instantly brings you to a moment where you’ve seen that happen, versus when you see a reconstruction of a glass smashing in a true-crime story, it doesn’t mean the same. Audio brings impact, which I have always both respected and and liked as a consumer.

All those years ago, the podcast Serial broke the mold and trained the world how to listen again. The younger market, in particular, loves listening. That’s why we have to respond to that either by copying them, joining them or being better. If you can’t beat them, join them. One of the ways of being better is to have easy-to-take-in, quick bites of television. That’s why shorts are on the rise. We want our information packaged and we want it quickly; we lead busy lives. We watch so much of our content on phones and tablets on the move, and we can’t watch 45-minute or two-hour programs all the time. Shorts are something that we make now for our YouTube channel. Shorts are somewhere where we see the direction of travel. Having said that, I don’t think you get the full story in a short.

TV REAL: What qualities does a case have to have to catch the interest of FirstLookTV? Do the qualities differ when it comes to short-form or audio versus long-form?
HANRAHAN: It does differ. I’ll give you an example as concisely as I can: There’s a series we’re making right now called Red Flag, which is a series about victims of crime who’ve missed red flags. These are survivor stories. Amongst the survivor stories is a short that we’re making about a young woman who was convinced to sleep with somebody she’d met on a dating app. He thereafter gaslit her and trolled her by saying that he was HIV positive, and now she was too. She went for a test. It wasn’t true. It was a psychological gaslighting. Goodness knows what his motivation was, but he did it. That’s an important story for us. It throws up many red flags, but it’s not a one-hour program. So we’re going to make that a short for one of our programs. It just suits it more. These are important stories sometimes that aren’t as layered as a documentary might need them to be, but you still should tell them. The victim’s voice telling us what’s important takes us a very long way.

TV REAL:What are your predictions for the true-crime landscape in 2024 and beyond?
HANRAHAN: The landscape will inevitably change by shrinking advertising budgets and falling subscriptions, so we are going to have to find clever ways of telling our stories because our budgets might recede. That’s not something we at FirstLookTV have to worry about because we think we’re rather good with our work processes. I can’t see us making less [content] because there seems to be an insatiable demand for true-crime stories. The genie is out of the bottle in many respects. These stories were always interesting, but they were not covered in areas other than specialist channels and news and current affairs. But they’re the stories that people watch on the news. They’re the stories that people go to on the specialist channels. They want more of them.

I have a theory that it makes us feel safer if we know what’s happening, and I don’t see that shrinking. [True crime] will be more intelligently made, and there will be a lot more shorts, a lot more podcasts and particularly short videos. Younger people consume in a different way than older people and don’t want to have a 45-minute viewing experience. They’d be happier with a 6- to 14-minute viewing experience. We have to answer that challenge. And it’s not because they have a low attention span. It’s the opposite. It’s because they want to know what’s coming next. Those push-button, give-me-information generations that are Generation Z and millennials want knowledge, and they want a lot of it. We have to answer that need.