Early in his career, Smerling was the associate producer of NBC's
Gangs, Cops and Drugs with
Tom Brokaw, and
The New Hollywood. He then founded production company Notorious Pictures, producing and directing more than a hundred television commercials and music videos. Smerling partnered up with
Andrew Jarecki to form their own production company Hit the Ground Running. He produced 2003's
Capturing the Friedmans, which was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the
Sundance Film Festival and nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Documentary and 2010's documentary film
Catfish, which inspired the television series
Catfish: The TV Show. In 2010, Smerling produced and wrote his first narrative feature film
All Good Things, starring
Ryan Gosling,
Kirsten Dunst and
Frank Langella, about the suspected murderer and real estate scion
Robert Durst. The film was the predecessor to the 2015 HBO documentary miniseries
The Jinx, which Smerling co-wrote and produced with
Andrew Jarecki and
Zachary Stuart-Pontier. He won the 2015 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary Series and was nominated for Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming. Smerling and Stuart-Pontier co-created the podcast
Crimetown, which debuted in 2016 and quickly became the most popular U.S. podcast on
iTunes. Each season of
Crimetown examines how
organized crime shaped an American city, starting with
Providence, Rhode Island, in season one. They also co-created
The RFK Tapes a Crimetown Presents podcast about the
assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. In 2022, he hosted a 15-part podcast series focused on the Mahoning Valley mafia and Congressman
Jim Traficant called "Crooked City: Youngstown OH." ==Filmography==