While Peacock’s “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” chronicles one of the most notorious serial killers in history, the show’s creative team took great care to ensure the show was, at its heart, laser focused on the real-life humans at the center of Gacy’s reign of terror.
Showrunner and executive producer Patrick Macmanus said his Peacock drama proves a show’s entertainment value won’t suffer when you prioritize the real-life humans in a true crime story, along with the emotional and mental well-being of its audience.
“I don’t think that it was ever really challenging to balance the entertainment versus the humanity of the story,” Macmanus told TheWrap in a new installment of “How I Did It,” presented by Peacock.” “The primary objective is to obviously entertain people — that always is mission statement No. 1. But if you don’t have a reason to tell the story, if it’s just purely for entertainment value, in my opinion and only my opinion, there’s no reason to do it.”
Like many other serial killers, Gacy’s cruel and disturbing murders have already been adapted into several TV series and films, which is one of the reasons Macmanus initially declined the project twice. However, after some thought, he circled back to the streamer with his own pitch: Focus the series on Gacy’s victims, the families who were impacted, the law officials who dedicated their lives to prosecuting Gacy and the systemic failures that enabled him for years.
“We made a decision early on not to show any of the murders or any of the assaults,” Macmanus said. “With the John Wayne Gacy case, it became very apparent that one of the things that we had to explore was the systemic failure of law enforcement to stop this person, and there were multiple opportunities to stop him. One of the things that fueled that systemic failure was prejudice and bias.”
The showrunner continued: “That is not prejudice and bias simply against queer individuals, it was against economically suppressed individuals, it was against individuals who had a prior record. It was the age of the kids, that it was just common practice that kids disappeared in the ’70s, that they ran away and then they came back, or they didn’t come back.”
In the midst of Macmanus finding his reason to move forward with the production, he also pondered how audiences would receive an non-sensationalized Gacy tale, particularly with Hollywood’s tendency to platform glamorized versions of true crime stories.
“I said from the very beginning that I felt like this was going to be something of a sociological experiment,” Macmanus said. “I was very curious if audiences would engage. It really did change the conversation as it related to an entire genre.”
And audiences did, so much so that it hit a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 95% and viewers rated it at 86%. Plus, “Devil in Disguise” just nabbed a Critics’ Choice nomination in the Best Limited Series category.
“We just chose to try to do it differently, and the takeaway is that you can have something that still focuses on the quote-unquote humanity while also being quote-unquote entertaining,” Macmanus shared. “That there’s enough room out there for both.”
Watch TheWrap’s full conversation with Macmanus about making “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” in the video above.
“Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” is now streaming on Peacock.
