Earlier this year, at a party in Brooklyn, I had a conversation with a young woman who had recently moved to the area. She was young, tall, pretty, quirky, white, an artist. She really did like the neighborhood, she was telling a group of people, although, she said, there was a lot of crime. There were attempted robberies all the time. Just the other day, there was a face-slashing in the park. She hadn’t witnessed any crime herself, but she followed all these events closely, on an app that tracked police activity. Someone asked why she would do that. Didn’t it just make her worry more? She paused for a second and then replied, “Have you heard of My Favorite Murder?”

My Favorite Murder is a wildly popular podcast that combines two well-proven formulas: the morbid fascination and investigative momentum of a true-crime show like Serial and confessional, comedic banter in the tradition of Marc Maron’s WTF. On each episode, the hosts, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, take turns telling each other about murder cases in an easy but avid manner, as though they were recounting episodes of 48 Hours they watched the night before. They get their facts from TV shows and various not-strictly-authoritative online sources; they’re loose with the details, riff freely, and take long digressions into movies they’ve seen and self-care tips they’ve learned in therapy. Sometimes they cover what they call the “heavy hitters,” such as Jeffrey Dahmer or the JonBenét Ramsey case, but more often they share the kinds of stories you see on late-night news, in which the victim is usually white, female, and, as they describe her, a “badass,” and the perpetrator is “a fucking monster.”

The hosts are funny, sincere, and self-deprecating, irreverent but not flippant, and, since launching the show, in 2016, they have attracted a following of fiercely loyal, mostly female fans, who call themselves Murderinos—a label that has graduated, for many, into a full-blown identity. (Just google “My Favorite Murder tattoo”; you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds.) What Kilgariff and Hardstark offer their listeners isn’t expertise (there are any number of mostly less successful podcasts you can go to for that) but, rather, the performance of a particular type of fandom, as they slip from gruesome killings to mundane personal anecdotes to inside jokes and indignant screeds informed by a girl-power-style feminism. Plenty of true-crime shows, under the guise of serious truth-telling and justice-seeking, are actually calibrated to fuel exactly these kinds of voyeuristic, half-informed, unfocused conversations among their audiences. My Favorite Murder merely articulates the id of such shows.

There is a definite whiff of the Colosseum about the whole thing.

When you talk about crime, you necessarily talk about punishment, and the way My Favorite Murder deals with criminal justice is particularly revealing of certain currents that run beneath the wider true-crime phenomenon. In a fairly typical moment from an early episode, Kilgariff tells the story of Larry Singleton, who, in 1978, raped a teenage girl, cut off her arms, and left her to die beside the road. She survived, and he served eight years of a 14-year sentence, then went on to commit a murder for which he was sentenced to death. “Unfortunately, he died of cancer in a prison hospital, instead of being fried,” Kilgariff says, in a comment that is both completely casual and, Singleton’s crimes notwithstanding, shockingly bloodthirsty. In live recordings of the show—which the pair perform around the world, to sold-out audiences of thousands—the stories often end with a killer being sentenced to death or executed, and the crowd goes reliably wild.

There is a definite whiff of the Colosseum about the whole thing. But it’s easy to see how you could get swept along to these reactions—they provide the clarity and catharsis that the stories demand. But My Favorite Murder didn’t develop these vindictive tendencies in a vacuum. In fact, the show partakes in a long-standing relationship between the crime-story genre and modern law enforcement, in which the stories we tell about crime and how to stop it prop up a system that is often as much about maintaining fantasies of social order as it is about implementing real justice.