CONTENT WARNING: mentions of murder, rape, cannibalism, death and sexual assault of children, racism, hate crimes, sex work, the prison system, involuntary commitment for mental illness, police brutality, and more.

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The true crime genre informs many people’s opinions of crime, policing, and the justice system. The genre of true crime often focuses on the details of a perpetrator’s personal history, the crime, and the investigation, and often ignores issues of race and injustice, with some going as far to call the genre “police propaganda.” Despite increasing commentary on institutional bias in the justice system through movements like Black Lives Matter, the true crime genre remains popular.

 

Since 2014, podcasts, and especially true crime podcasts, have become very popular and influential within both the true crime genre and mainstream culture. Studies have shown that true crime podcasts reproduce the genre norms of true crime, but also raise new questions that challenge existing paradigms of victimization, policing, and justice.

 

This study analyzes the podcast Fruitloops: Serial Killers of Color, which is hosted by a woman of color and a white woman. I conducted a narrative analysis of Fruitloops, focusing on how the show both reproduces and challenges the ideology of the true crime genre in the areas of race, bias, policing, incarceration, sentencing, and the death penalty.

 

This study found that Fruitloops challenged genre norms by being suspicious of the heroism of criminal justice professionals and by completely reversing the genre-typical erasure of race. However, it also frequently positioned incarceration as a solution to violent crime and only infrequently discussed alternatives to calling the police. Still, Fruitloops mostly subverts the narratives perpetuated by the true crime genre, provides insight into racial issues and other biases in the justice system, and emphasizes the need for approaches that keep all people safe from violence regardless of identity. 

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**Note: timestamps mentioned throughout may be a few minutes off. They change as the ads embedded within the episode change length.