HBO’s brand new crime thriller, The Night Of, opens calmly enough. We watch a young college kid meander through his day. He’s a nerd, a good boy, and the son of immigrants, so he naturally just wants one night to get away and be “cool” for once. What follows is a series of truly unfortunate events that never seem to climax; they just keep coming, like a ceaselessly cresting wave of dread. The shadowy beauty he drives around town and follows home winds up dead. He’s the likely suspect. And as the night unfurls, it’s clear that cops might think he’s the only suspect.

Does this sound at all familiar? Does the set up of following one poor soul accused of murder sound like a podcast, docu-series, or miniseries you’ve recently watched? That’s probably because The Night Of is the latest entry in a new kind of crime story. In the 21st century, the crime genre has moved away from clinical open-shut “Whodunnits?” and moody noir adventures. Now, crime storytelling takes a deeper interest in the emotional devastation wrecked by murder and our society’s fatal flaws.

The detective story was invented by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841 and the American writer quickly established the rules and conventions of the genre. The big one: the detective in question has to be fair. Soon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and scores more perfected the genre. For decades, a crackling crime story was defined by the mental puzzle presented to the audience — and how well its hero or heroine solved it. No matter what else happens, the reader or viewer can walk away from the story confident that the truth has come out and justice has been served.

In modern crime storytelling, ideas of truth, justice, and fairness are thrown out the window. While Poe envisioned a genre that dramatized deciphering a puzzle — i.e. it’s a mental exercise dressed up as a drama — in our new era of crime, the focus is not merely on the mental, but the emotional, the moral, and the injustice rotting at society’s core. Often, these stories examine one single crime and how it affects or reflects the society around it. You could say that our current collective fascination with Serial, Making A Murderer, the O.J. Simpson trial, Luther, et al is all about realizing that the “heroes” in these stories don’t play fair. No one does.

These new crime stories use a murder mystery as the way to get our brains latched into the story. Soon, we’re examining every character as though he or she is a suspect. And it’s through this lens that we can see the everyday injustices we all are complicit in. We see racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, Islamophobia, and old-fashioned corruption with new eyes. We get an opportunity to see how mental illness, moral depravity, and simple human error fog our best judgment. Most of all, we discover that there are no easy answers. These new crime dramas want to leave us hanging in front of the bigger, meatier life mysteries — without a tidy answer.

This is why I’d suggest that just as we are in a so-called “Golden Age of Television,” we’re also in the midst of a new “Golden Age of Crime Storytelling.” Across media platforms, journalists, writers, and documentary filmmakers are playing with this tried and true genre in breath-taking ways. The Night Of is coming on the heels of Making a Murderer, The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Serial, American Crime, Fargo, True Detective, and Broadchurch. It’s also coming ahead of David E. Kelley’s hyped up return to the genre, Goliath (an Amazon series poised to apply Kelley’s touch to one long legal battle). It’s a brave new world for crime where we can expect the detectives, lawyers, and reporters on the case to solve nothing, but reveal all.

[Watch Episode One of The Night Of on HBO Now]

[Photos: HBO, Netflix]