‘What’s unique about this show is that it starts at the end of the beginning’

Distributor BossaNova
Producer Phoenix Television
Length 10 x 60 minutes
Broadcaster CBS Reality (UK)

The audience appetite for true-crime documentaries shows no sign of waning, and producers are working hard to find new angles and perspectives. Murder: First On Scene adds to the oeuvre by focusing on the variety of professionals who respond to the crime in the first instance.

This isn’t just the story of the first police responders at the scene after a crime has been committed; it also covers the people who staff the emergency services phone-lines, the initial experts called in, and the first prosecuting lawyers, among others.

Murder: First On Scene was ordered by CBS Reality from Hampshire-based Phoenix Television and follows the timeline of 10 murder cases – five from the UK, five from the US.

Employing personal testimonial and stylised reconstruction, the series explores the ingenious methods used by police to catch a killer, via the help of criminologists, forensics officers, cyber-security experts and entomologists.

BossaNova came on board to bridge the funding gap for Phoenix and this is the first time the nascent distributor has worked with the five-year-old indie. The series launched in November 2021, with an overnight audience of 163,000, comfortably outperforming its slot average.

BossaNova acquisitions and co-production executive Olivia Morgan emphasises the “new way into true crime” the series offers. “It’s not sensationalist, it’s investigative,” she says.

“There have been many crime stories that start at the end and work backwards – that’s a well-known storytelling technique both in scripted and unscripted. What’s unique about this show is that it starts at the end of the beginning.”

Including US murders alongside UK cases adds to the show’s appeal, Morgan says, adding that reports of homicides from the States can be outlandish and horrifying. The initial sales strategy is to target linear broadcasters on a market-to-market basis, and BossaNova is already attracting interest in the series.

Murder: First On Scene is part of a carefully crafted BossaNova slate, and will sit alongside another high-quality true-crime documentary, The Ripper Speaks. The latter revisits the Yorkshire Ripper case by focusing on audio recordings of conversations between Peter Sutcliffe and a female researcher that were carried out while he was incarcerated.

“Ours is a heavily curated slate – it’s not just grab, grab, grab what you can,” explains Morgan. “We’re always looking for a point of difference, and this wasn’t acquired because others have got something like this. If the editorial matches up with what the need is in the market, then we’ll go for it.”