Kaley Cuoco, Chris Messina star in 'Based on a True Story,' a tale of a killer idea that goes awry

In the new Peacock series, Kaley Cuoco plays a woman obsessed with true crime, and the series highlights an explosion of coverage of true crime in recent years

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,” she said.

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.