Hosted by Phoebe Judge Language English Debut January 2014 | Genre True crime Production Lauren Spohrer Website thisiscriminal.com | |
Criminal is an independently-produced podcast that focuses on true crime. It is part of the Radiotopia network. The show describes itself as telling "stories of people who've done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle"
Criminal explores a different criminal case in each episode across a wide range of topics including stories about a mother-daughter coroner team, a student who manufactured counterfeit banknotes with inkjet printers and an African American man who was wrongfully shot by police in front of his mother and father. Original illustrations for each episode are available on the official website.
Criminal was originally created by Lauren Spohrer, Eric Mennel, and Phoebe Judge and was launched in January 2014 after Spohrer, Mennel and Judge met while working on The Story with Dick Gordon at WUNC.
Critical Reception
Criminal has been described as "the best new radio show in America" in The Huffington Post, by Time as "the purist’s true crime series" and by Alexis Soloski, theater critic at The New York Times; "no matter how strange or ghastly the crime, the voice of the host Phoebe Judge somehow remains implacable and oddly soothing." Criminal was chosen by Wired as one of the "Best Podcasts of 2015" and was included twice in the Vulture roundup: "The 10 Best Podcasts and 10 Best Podcast Episodes of 2015," where it was described as "a true-crime podcast that understands crime as something sociological, historical, even anthropological — that crime is a function of people, time, and place.
The episode 695-BGK was one of nine award winners at the 2015 Third Coast International Audio Festival.