Welcome to Basic TV Week, a celebration of all the bad, perfect, and (mostly) network television we can't get enough of.

Keith Morrison’s voice sounds like how it feels to be tucked in under a weighted blanket and dosed with unregulated CBD oil. It’s a warm and rhythmic baritone that produces the same chemical effect in the brain as testing out a mall-stand scalp massager, or watching that moment in a commercial when a candy bar is split in half and the caramel interior pulls apart and suspends in midair. It’s a voice that can say something like “The killer was having a virtual dungeon built in his basement—he burned, we still don't know exactly what parts of her, in his backyard” while you’re eating lunch at an airy New American restaurant in Manhattan, and you will ingest that information and nod and keep right on chewing your food.

When Keith Morrison speaks publicly, it’s usually about murder. He’s been a correspondent on the true-crime docuseries Dateline for 25 years, during which he’s emerged as the show’s biggest name. The mild-mannered Canada native counts pop stars Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift as Dateline fans, has been gushed over by actress Kristen Bell, and was regularly impersonated on Saturday Night Live by comedian Bill Hader. (He thinks the latter is funny but insists, “I can swear to God, I've never said that pesky DNA.”) An Instagram account with 19,000 followers called Keith Leans on Things exists solely to document his habit of reclining against stationary objects during broadcasts. Morrison is bemused, if entertained, by his popularity. “If you make it through an airport with fewer than ten selfies with somebody, you're lucky,” he jokes. “I pinch myself. An old geezer, and I still get the selfies.”

Bill Hader and Keith Morrison. NBC

Morrison is the granddaddy of true crime. It’s a peculiar kind of fame, made possible by America’s seemingly bottomless appetite for the genre. Aside from Dateline, there is a glut of shows that run the gamut, from the prestigious—Making a Murderer, The Jinx, The Staircase—to the unabashedly pulpy—Snapped, Nurses Who Kill, Killer Women with Piers Morgan. There are conventions like CrimeCon, where hordes of obsessives gather to indulge their enthusiasm for the macabre. There are countless strangers, overwhelmingly women, who are forever bonded by tattoos scrawled on their wrists and forearms that read SSDGM or STAY SEXY. DON'T GET MURDERED, the catchphrase from My Favorite Murder, an irreverent podcast with a fanatical following. In fact, as of this writing, half of the top ten podcasts on Apple are about true crime. Dateline has entered that arms race, too, with a podcast called The Thing About Pam that launched earlier this month. Hosted by Morrison, it delves into the case of a convicted murderer who was, bizarrely enough, trying to pass herself off as a Dateline producer. It hit number one on the charts after the trailer was released.

But Dateline has been a true-crime mainstay and ratings juggernaut long before everyone and their mother was getting into the business. It’s also for everyone and their mother: I can say with confidence that it’s the only show that my Middle Eastern mother, my Midwestern mother-in-law, my 84-year-old grandmother, and I all watch. I stockpile DVR-ed episodes for nights when I’m exhausted from work, knowing, somewhat uneasily, that it will serve up reliable television comfort food.