Kaley Cuoco, Chris Messina Star in ‘Based on a True Story,’ a Tale of a Killer Idea That Goes Awry

Cast members Chris Messina and Kaley Cuoco attend a premiere for the television series "Based on a True Story" in West Hollywood, California, US, June 1, 2023. (Reuters)
Cast members Chris Messina and Kaley Cuoco attend a premiere for the television series "Based on a True Story" in West Hollywood, California, US, June 1, 2023. (Reuters)
TT
20

Kaley Cuoco, Chris Messina Star in ‘Based on a True Story,’ a Tale of a Killer Idea That Goes Awry

Cast members Chris Messina and Kaley Cuoco attend a premiere for the television series "Based on a True Story" in West Hollywood, California, US, June 1, 2023. (Reuters)
Cast members Chris Messina and Kaley Cuoco attend a premiere for the television series "Based on a True Story" in West Hollywood, California, US, June 1, 2023. (Reuters)

In the new Peacock series “Based on a True Story,” debuting Thursday, Kaley Cuoco plays Ava, a woman obsessed with true crime. She consumes these dark stories all day, analyzes the cases with her friends and murder-centric podcasts help lull her to sleep at night.

“Do we have to wake up to murder every morning?” her husband Nathan, played by Chris Messina, asks in a scene.

The series highlights an explosion of coverage of true crime in recent years. It is the subject of podcasts, documentary series, books, and social media posts where amateur sleuths breathlessly weigh in on the latest crime du jour.

In “Based on a True Story,” Ava hatches a plan to start a podcast — hosted by the couple — to interview a serial killer. She is confident that it will be lucrative and add excitement into their otherwise middle-aged monotony.

The choices made by Ava and Nathan in the series, argues Cuoco, are similar to the subjects of actual true crime stories whose fate is determined by one bad decision.

“It happens all the time,” said Cuoco. “That’s why this was very believable to me. They are in a desperate situation, make a really ridiculous choice out of desperation and end up in a very bad place. In my opinion, they’re as bad as the killer by the end of this.”

Cuoco admits to being a fan of true crime herself and likens it to “looking at an accident” on the road. "We're rubberneckers,” she said.

Co-star Liana Liberato, who plays Ava's younger sister, has a list of true crime podcasts to recommend. “Some of my favorites are 'S-Town', 'Root of Evil', ' To Live and Die in LA. ' I'm a little too obsessed. I relate very much to Kaley's character,” Liberato said.

She's not the only one. On the morning of the cast's interviews, Priscilla Quintana, who plays Ava's friend Ruby on the show, woke extra early and tuned into, what else but true crime.

"I woke up at 4:30 a.m., and I didn’t have to be here until like seven, so I cleaned my whole kitchen (and) listened to the newest episode of 'Crime Junkie.' Why is it the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning,” she wondered aloud.

In one episode, Cuoco and Messina's characters attend CrimeCon in Las Vegas — which is similar to Comic-Con but for fans of true crime. It’s an actual event, by the way, that will be held later this year in Orlando.

“I see the addiction of it,” Messina said who doesn't seek out the genre but can get caught up by an episode of say, “Dateline,” like the rest of us.

He likes to use it as his own mental exercise to be prepared if things go south. “For me, it’s always a nice puzzle to figure out how people got into this situation and how can I not. And if I do, how can I be saved?”



When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
TT
20

When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)

Cruella de Vil wanted to turn Dalmatian puppies into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to bomb Peter Pan and Maleficent issued a curse of early death for Aurora.

But wait, maybe these Disney villains were just misunderstood? That's the premise of a new musical show at Walt Disney World that has some people wondering: When did Disney's villains stop wanting to be so ... villainous?

The live show, "Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After," debuts May 27 at Disney's Hollywood Studios park at the Orlando, Florida, resort. In the show, the three baddies of old-school Disney movies plead their cases before an audience that they are the most misunderstood villains of them all.

"We wanted to tell a story that's a little different than what's been told before: Which one of them has been treated the most unfairly ever after?" Mark Renfrow, a creative director of the show, said in a promotional video.

That hook - the narrative kind, not the captain - is scratching some Disney observers the wrong way.

"I think it's wonderful when you still have stories where villains are purely villainous," said Benjamin Murphy, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Florida State University's campus in Panama. "When you have villains reveling in their evil, it can be amusing and satisfying."

Disney has some precedent for putting villains in a sympathetic light, or at least explaining how they got to be so evil. The 2021 film, "Cruella," for instance, presents a backstory for the dog-hater played by actor Emma Stone that blames her villainy on her birth mother never wanting her.

Other veins of pop culture have rethought villains too, perhaps none more famously than the book, theatrical musical and movie versions of "Wicked," the reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West character from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

The blockbuster success of "Wicked, " which was based on the 1995 novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," sparked the trend of rethinking villains in popular entertainment, Murphy said.

"With trends like that, the formula is repeated and repeated until it's very predictable: Take a villain and make them sympathetic," he said.

The centuries-old fairy tales upon which several Disney movies are based historically were meant to teach children a lesson, whether it was not to get close to wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs) or trust strange, old women in the woods (Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel).

But they often made marginalized people into villains - older women, people of color or those on the lower socioeconomic scale, said Rebecca Rowe, an assistant professor of children's literature at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

The trend toward making villains more sympathetic started in the late 1980s and 1990s as children's media took off. There was a desire to present villains in a manner that was more complicated and less black and white, as there was an overall cultural push toward emphasizing acceptance, she said.

"The problem is everyone has swung so hard into that message, that we have kind of lost the villainous villains," Rowe said. "There is value in the villainous villains. There are people who just do evil things. Sometimes there is a reason for it, but sometimes not. Just because there is a reason doesn't mean it negates the harm."

Whether it's good for children to identify with villains is complicated. There is a chance they adopt the villains' traits if it's what they identify with, but then some scholars believe it's not a bad thing for children to empathize with characters who often are part of marginalized communities, Rowe said.

The Disney villains also tend to appeal to adults more than children. They also appreciate the villains' campiness, with some "Disney princesses" gladly graduating into "evil queens."

Erik Paul, an Orlando resident who has had a year-round pass to Disney World for the past decade, isn't particularly fond of the villains, but understands why Disney would want to frame them in a more sympathetic light in a show dedicated just to them.

"I know friends who go to Hollywood Studios mainly to see the villain-related activities," Paul said. "Maybe that's why people like the villains because they feel misunderstood as well, and they feel a kinship to the villains."