The woman at the bar dateline4/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Morrison’s life started in the small city of Lloydminster, Canada, where he was the second-youngest of five children raised by a father who was a minister for the United Church of Canada and a music teacher mother. With his lanky frame and full head of impeccably coiffed white hair, he could moonlight as an actor in a Centrum Silver commercial, so yeah, fair point about the sugar babies. The day we meet, a scorching late-August afternoon, he’s wearing his trademark navy laceless Converse sneakers with jeans and a sky blue denim button-down (yes, a Canadian in a Canadian tuxedo). Morrison is 72 years old and the very portrait of wholesome authority. “Look at me,” he deadpans, gesturing to himself. It’s 2019, everybody knows about sugar babies! “You didn’t?” “Uh-huh,” I respond, but what I really mean is, Come on, Keith. In between bites of a mushroom–black bean burger, Morrison is talking about the next story he’s pursuing. “Do you know about this, sugar babies and sugaring?” Morrison asks. “You realize that nobody comes on our show unless they want to, and it can be cathartic for people, so, fine,” Morrison continues. It hit number one on the charts after the trailer was released. 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. Dateline has entered that arms race, too, with a podcast called The Thing About Pam that launched earlier this month. In fact, as of this writing, half of the top ten podcasts on Apple are about true crime. DON'T GET MURDERED, the catchphrase from My Favorite Murder, an irreverent podcast with a fanatical following. There are countless strangers, overwhelmingly women, who are forever bonded by tattoos scrawled on their wrists and forearms that read SSDGM or STAY SEXY. There are conventions like CrimeCon, where hordes of obsessives gather to indulge their enthusiasm for the macabre. 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. It’s a peculiar kind of fame, made possible by America’s seemingly bottomless appetite for the genre. Morrison is the granddaddy of true crime. An old geezer, and I still get the selfies.” “If you make it through an airport with fewer than ten selfies with somebody, you're lucky,” he jokes. Morrison is bemused, if entertained, by his popularity. (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. 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’s been a correspondent on the true-crime docuseries Dateline for 25 years, during which he’s emerged as the show’s biggest name. When Keith Morrison speaks publicly, it’s usually about murder. 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. 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. Keith Morrison’s voice sounds like how it feels to be tucked in under a weighted blanket and dosed with unregulated CBD oil. Welcome to Basic TV Week, a celebration of all the bad, perfect, and (mostly) network television we can't get enough of. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |