As the second instalment of Making a Murderer is released and demand for cold cases is higher than ever, the limit could be being reached

“What makes a murder perfect?” asks the true crime podcast reporter David Pascall oleaginously over the obligatory unresolved piano-chord sequence. “What elevates a murder from a regular ho-hum killing to a crime so gruesome and compelling that it deserves its own podcast?” He finds the answer in a small Nebraska town called Bluff Springs, which is reeling from the death of 17-year-old Hayley Price.

Just as in other successful podcasts S-Town, Serial and Criminal, a horrific crime has happened in a small town no one has heard of, the cops allegedly screw up the investigation and then an earnest podcaster unearths new evidence, a miscarriage of justice and/or proof that things aren’t what they seem.

Not really. There is no Bluff Springs, Nebraska, and Hayley doesn’t exist, let alone get killed in circumstances that expose the, erm, you know, dark underbelly of middle America. Rather, A Very Fatal Murder is the Onion Public Radio’s note-perfect satire of the true crime genre.

Alongside it on the satire scene is the intriguing spectacle of Netflix biting the true crime hand that fed it: American Vandal’s second season started last month and saw Peter and Sam investigate a Catholic private high school where the cafeteria’s lemonade is contaminated with laxatives by someone calling themselves The Turd Burglar.

Once the satirists of true crime move in, doesn’t that suggest the genre is deader than disco? On the contrary. The true crime wave that rose with The Staircase, Serial, Making a Murderer, OJ: Made in America and The Keepers shows no signs of crashing. Take Serial: when it was launched on 3 October 2014, it was downloaded 86,000 times. Today, the combined downloads for the first two seasons have topped 350m. And the first two episodes of series three were downloaded by more than 1.4 million people in the first 14 hours of release.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clueless: American Vandal, Netflix’s true crime parody. Photograph: Tyler Golden / Netflix

In Serial’s new trailer, host Sarah Koenig recounts how she witnessed “a litany of things that shouldn’t be allowed”, including “extra charges loaded on to a case, pressure to plead, shoddy police work”. “Ordinary cases are where we need to look,” she says. “I’ve had this urgent feeling of wanting to kind of hold open the courthouse door, and wave people inside. Because things are happening – shocking things, fascinating things – in plain sight.”

But ordinary cases are not where the most successful true crime reporters are looking. They’re looking for the lurid, the down and the dirty to match supply with demand. What devotees demand is for the likes of Koenig to place her hand on the backs of our heads and push us very gently into someone else’s trough. True, we may self-servingly tell ourselves we are listening or watching in order to witness critiques of the criminal justice system or telling liberal truth to redneck power, and we certainly admired Koenig and producer Julie Snyder for starting a ball rolling that led to Adnan Syed’s conviction for murder being overturned two years ago. But our thrills are mostly vicarious rather than manifestations of civic responsibility.

True crime fans are also lured in by the hope that a show will become interactive, letting them turn detective. Serial’s fans, for instance, started doing their own investigations on a subreddit. But here’s the twist: as Michelle Dean reported in the Guardian, people who were involved in the crime may well be reading Serial’s subreddit, too. “My worst case scenario is that a responsible party to the murder is watching the sub, gets tipped off that evidence to their guilt is surfacing, and are able to evade arrest because of us,” Jay White, who moderated the SerialPodcast subreddit under the name Jakeprops, told Dean.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Durst in The Jinx. Photograph: HBO/Courtesy Everett Collectio

Quite possibly, then, as the genre retools itself as True Crime 2.0 in order to survive, interactivity will become an increasingly popular feature. As it develops, the genre depends on the exotic. “All great true crime stories are set in a world unknown to the reader,” says the US-based Loaded reporter turned true crime writer Jeff Maysh. “I’m not interested in the cat killer in Croydon. I want to take the reader on a journey through Atlanta’s red light district at the birth of pornography, or the counterfeiting industry during Depression-era New York.”

I get in touch with Maysh because he has sold the film rights to one of his best stories to Fox for $1m (£775,000), with Ben Affleck attached to direct, Matt Damon starring, and the Deadpool team of Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese hired to write the script.

Maysh’s story How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions, published in the Daily Beast in July, detailed how the ex-cop Jerome Paul Jacobson rigged the McDonald’s game in 2001, allegedly stealing millions of dollars.

Why does he think Hollywood bought the story?

“The McDonald’s story was the perfect storm,” says Maysh. “There were vast amounts of money involved in the fraud, as well as two great American institutions, McDonald’s and Monopoly, and it was completely original.”

Readers enjoy stories where justice prevails. It just doesn’t feel like that right now in America. Jeff Maysh

Maysh doesn’t think we have reached peak true crime, and that the only future for the genre is if producers start ordering hits to supply raw material. “We are in the golden age of true crime,” he says. “Readers enjoy stories where justice prevails. The bad guys usually get caught and are held accountable. It just doesn’t feel like that right now in America.”

But maybe demand is outstripping supply. Haven’t the juiciest cases already been cherrypicked? Surely there can’t be many more unreported cases as captivating as Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx, a six-part HBO documentary in 2015 that, unusually, sought to implicate rather than exonerate its subject, Robert Durst. Nor, surely, can there be a repeat of The Staircase, which as the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston wrote, had “just about everything: tragedy, corruption, disinterment, perjury – plus a lot of blood-spatter analysis”.

Isn’t there a supply problem? “Not in America,” says Maysh. “I search for stories using newspaper archives on microfilm. You can pick a random newspaper in Florida, turn the wheel, and fascinating crimes just whiz past before your eyes. I’ll sit there until I strike gold or feel seasick. We will never run out of amazing true crime.”

In the olden days, bands had that second album problem – they had used up all the good material on the first record. Making a Murderer is trying to overcome the same problem as its second series is released on Netflix this week, three years after the first. Its makers are waiting for real life to give them the storyline, but real life doesn’t necessarily play nice.

Instead, Making A Murderer: Part 2 picks up where series one left off. Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, are both still serving life sentences for the murder of Teresa Halbach. “This is a real opportunity to try to help educate viewers about a lesser-known part of the American criminal justice system, the post-conviction phase,” says co-director Laura Ricciardi.

It is understandable Ricciardi says that. The public interest defence is always the go-to justification for anyone putting their cameras where the sun doesn’t shine. But that isn’t why the genre in which she is a virtuoso is so popular right now. If only she had added: “Plus, viewers will get to look into the great true-life dramas normally hidden from view. We’re talking violence, betrayal, greed, stupidity, sex, murder, racial tension, misogyny, poor folk sucking on the fuzzy end of a rigged judicial system, fraud, secrets and lies. You won’t be able to look away.” That would have been nearer the truth of why true crime makes good TV.

Making a Murderer season two is on Netflix now