From The Shrink Next Door to Dr Death, true-crime podcasts are being snapped up for TV. But how does it really feel when your worst nightmare becomes a bingewatch?
The dark new drama The Shrink Next Door tells an almost unbelievable story. Almost, of course, because it actually happened. In 1980s
New York, wealthy businessman Martin “Marty” Markowitz fell under the spell of his psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, who manipulated Marty into giving him his house, handing over his business and cutting off his family for almost 30 years. In an adaptation penned by one of Succession’s writers, Georgia Pritchett, Will Ferrell plays the patient whom many assumed was the handyman in his own home, while Paul Rudd is the smarmy shrink turned cuckoo in the nest.
If the story sounds familiar, that’s because the show is based on the hit podcast of the same name. The Shrink Next Door is the latest in the podcast to TV trend, which includes Julia Roberts’s Homecoming, Dirty John, with Connie Britton as the gaslit victim of “Dirty” John Meehan (Eric Bana), and Dr Death – based on the terrifying tale of sociopathic surgeon Christopher Duntsch – starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin.