INDIANAPOLIS — It’s no secret — the current society is obsessed with true crime, from podcasts to documentaries to dramatizations of serial killers and events.

Many times, the violent acts are shown on screen to emphasize the atrocities that took place.

That isn’t the case in “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy,” which completely avoids showing any actual murder or violence on screen.

“I took a meeting with our showrunner and executive producer Patrick Macmanus. I was a little bit hesitant at first to take on a role like this, as you might imagine, but Patrick told me this idea that our show was going to have a slightly different point of view, that we’d be focusing on the victims and their families in that story, and that we wouldn’t be showing any actual murder or violence on screen. That kind of drew me in,” said Chernus (“Orange Is the New Black,” “Severance”), who plays the titular serial killer.

Gacy is one of America’s most notorious serial killers, murdering dozens of young men from 1972-1978.

“This is a case that has been covered almost ad nauseam since John Gacy was arrested in 1978, and we felt like we didn’t want to give any more attention to that aspect of the show,” Chernus said. “Also, there are still family members who are alive today of the victims, and we didn’t want to cause any more harm than has already been done. Another thing is I feel that often when, even though the violence isn’t shown, audience members’ imaginations kind of fill in the blanks, and there’s something almost even scarier about that.”

Chris Sullivan (“This Is Us,” “The Knick”) plays Bill Kunkle, who is in charging prosecuting and putting together the case against Gacy.

“The show really focuses on the victims’ lives as they lead up to their encounter with John Wayne Gacy, and then on the flip side, after John is discovered and the case that is being put together against him, it shows the difficult nature that law enforcement and prosecutors have to get things right, so that this person absolutely goes away forever,” Sullivan said. “(It shows) how complicated that is and how difficult and extensive a process that is and how hard that can be for families to have to wait and to have to practice patience that they should never have to practice.”

Gacy was able to hide his crimes for all of those years because he was so beloved amongst the community. For instance, he would dress as a clown while volunteering to entertain sick kids.

“The things that struck me in doing research for this job was just how sort of normal seeming John Gacy was. Obviously, he was anything but normal, but he blended into society so well. Everybody thought of him as the friendly neighbor, who if you needed your car jumped, he’d be there, to help you or shovel your driveway,” Chernus said. “In a way, to me, he’s scarier than some of the other serial killers that we know about because he was really hiding in plain sight.”

“Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” is getting rave reviews, with a 94% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 76 score on Metacritic.

“One of the takeaways for me was that the era in which a lot of these cases take place, the part of the reason that these killers are allowed to proliferate for as long as they do is because of a societal sense of homophobia or misogyny. There are these groups who don’t get the same attention that they should, and it allows things like this to go on for much, much longer than they should,” Sullivan said. “I think it just involves listening. We need to be listening a lot more to to what communities like this are going through and what they need and how we can keep everybody top of mind and safe.”

All eight episodes of “Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy” are now streaming on Peacock.