‘I Know If Amanda Was Alive, She’d Be A Patreon Member’: TikTok’s Best Podcast Parodists Take Down True Crime

You can’t spell “living well off of the kindness of my Patreon subscribers and the suffering of strangers” without “serial killers,” as long as you’re into light anagrams like the Zodiac stans.

Caroline and Meg Baniewicz are two of the absolute best parodists on TikTok, and, to them, the many insufferable genres of podcasting are what a child abduction case in rural Arkansas is to a true-crime podcaster — an absolute goldmine. Typically, they’ve gone after the finance bros and Andrew Tate imitators who clog up the podcasting scene with variations on the “hustle, grind, lift” brand of aspirational “alpha male” messaging, but one of their most recent parody podcasting videos puts the aforementioned Spotify sleuths in the spotlight.

With hits like Morbid, Crime Junky and My Favorite Murder continuing to climb up the charts on every podcast platform, the market for monetized misery has never boomed more — as any one of these podcasters might say, “What would I do if people weren’t getting brutally murdered?”

The pervasiveness of true-crime podcasts in American culture is so severe that we even have award-winning TV shows like Only Murders in the Building dedicated to the macabre medium through which countless communications majors have cashed in on the grisly murders of strangers. Seemingly started by the success of Sarah Koenig’s Serial, the explosion of exploitative true-crime content in recent years has proven that the suffering of real-life murder victims is profoundly bankable entertainment to millions of moms across the country.

As ghoulish and tone-deaf as these shows are, it would be unfair of me to assert that no good has ever come from the countless shows that fetishize real-life brutality without the consent of the victims’ families — after all, somebody needs to keep the branded tote bag industry afloat. Those Patreon rewards aren’t going to sew themselves.