Dirty John is a familiar story with an unusual middleman. The new Bravo limited series blends in easily with the true crime dramatizations (American Crime Story, the latest Law & Order spinoff), parodies (American Vandal, Trial & Error), and documentaries (The Keepers, Making a Murderer) that make up a still-growing chunk of television real estate. And with a basic plot that sounds like it was generated by an algorithm raised on a steady diet of Lifetime original movies, Dirty John hearkens back to even more established tropes. A wealthy white woman enters a whirlwind romance with a handsome doctor who seems like the perfect man. You can already hear the ominous voice-over: Or is he?
But while the stranger-than-fiction story of Dirty John does come from real life, the doomed marriage of Orange County businesswoman Debra Newell and violent con man John Meehan first gained an audience not as a cable news story, but as a podcast. In October 2017, the Los Angeles Times ran a <a…
