Netflix quietly axes fan favourite ahead of next month’s Season 5 premiere

Netflix is about to pull the plug on one of its more talked-about true-crime offerings: Conversations With a Killer. The series, which has made a habit of digging into the minds of history’s most notorious murderers, is gearing up for its fifth and—brace yourself—final outing this August.

The fifth and final series of Conversations With a Killer premieres on Netflix on 12 August 2026.

Five Killers, Five Series

Let’s do a quick trip down memory lane. American documentarian Joe Berlinger kicked off the franchise back in 2019 with The Ted Bundy Tapes, immediately setting the tone with the sort of archival footage and deeply unpleasant recorded interviews that would become the show’s signature. After that, we got treated to The John Wayne Gacy Tapes and The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes—both in 2022—before The Son of Sam Tapes arrived last year. Each series zones in on a different killer, always with a heavy dose of archive material and present-day forensic commentary. It’s grim, but it’s absolutely gripping, if you’ve got the stomach for it.

Now, the final batch of episodes comes with an infamous twist: we’re getting The Charles Manson Tapes. Certainly, hardly a ‘by-the-book’ serial killer, but Manson and his motley crew are responsible for at least nine horrific murders in 1969, and the aftermath changed both true-crime storytelling and the public’s appetite for these twisted tales.

Manson Takes Centre Stage

This isn’t just your standard retread of the Manson Family’s crimes. The upcoming series is relying on a fresh batch of unreleased prison recordings, straightforward interviews with former Manson Family members, as well as a fair amount of old news footage and those slightly sinister recorded phone calls with Manson himself. If you know your true crime, you’ll expect some heavy focus on how the media covered the whole affair, and how Manson managed to pull so many people into his warped orbit.

Berlinger’s reasoning for making Manson the show’s last word is interesting. Manson’s hardly the classic lone wolf killer—a fact Berlinger has pointed out himself—but he and the Family had a cultural impact that can’t be ignored. The series aims to pull apart the manipulative methods that made Manson so disturbingly effective. Here’s how Berlinger described the thinking behind the season, according to the official blurb:

Drawing on previously unreleased prison recordings, firsthand accounts, and archival footage, this documentary series traces Charles Manson’s rise as a cult leader, the 1969 murders that followed, and the media spectacle of his trial. The series features interviews with former Manson Family members and law enforcement alongside recorded phone calls with Manson himself.