Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours
This is a podcast where we treat movies, television, and other popular culture artifacts not just as entertainment, but as cultural evidence. As artifacts that reveal how we think about crime, justice, power, and culture. I’m Kevin Buckler, PhD in Criminal Justice, and a professor at a four-year public university. On Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours, I bring you sharp, unfiltered content about how film, television, and media shape the way we understand crime, law, and justice — and what those stories reveal about our legal system, our communities, and the world around us.
Episodes
14 episodes
America's Forgotten Holiday: The Case for a *Celebrated* Constitution Day
In this episode, Crime and Popular Culture Office Hours takes a brief departure from the American Crime Landscapes series to examine a different kind of artifact. Instead of analyzing a film, television show, or work of literature, we turn our ...
S1 E12 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: The Degenerate Family Beyond the Last Gas Station — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Franchise
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is widely regarded as one of the most influential horror films ever made. Over the past fifty years, it has grown into a sprawling franchise of sequels, remakes, prequels, and reboots that have conti...
S 1 E 11 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: The Landscape that Demanded Blood — The Wicker Man (1973) and Folk Horror
The Wicker Man (1973) is widely regarded as one of the greatest folk horror films ever made. Although set on a fictional Scottish island, its themes profoundly influenced American depictions of rural crime, isolated communities, and al...
S 1 E 10 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: The River with Memory but no Witnesses — Deliverance (1972) and the Myth of the Mountain Man
Deliverance (1972) is a film that for generations has shaped how Americans imagine rural danger. For many viewers, the film is remembered for its famous dueling banjos sequence and its brutal sexual assault scene. But what does Del...
S 1 E 9 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: Sheriff Taylor's Small Town America — Mayberry and the Myth of Rural Justice
For generations, "Mayberry" has served as shorthand for a simpler, safer, and more orderly America. But what does The Andy Griffith Show actually tell us about crime and justice? In this episode of Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours, host Kev...
S 1 E 8 American (Rural) Crime Landscapes: Shirley Jackson’s The Summer People — Rural Degeneration or Misplaced Fear of the Rural Other?
American Crime Landscapes is a series exploring how popular culture imagines crime, justice, deviance, and social control through place. Across novels, films, television, music, and other cultural artifacts, the series examines how urban, subur...
S 1 E 7 American Crime Landscapes: An Introduction to the Crime and Place Series (Urban, Suburban, and Rural)
This is the introductory episode of a new series of Crime and Pop Culture Office Hours. The series is called "American Crime Landscapes." It begins with a simple question: What do we really mean when we say urban, suburban, and rural? In this i...
S 1 E 6 The Juvenile Super Predator: The Monster We Imagined and the Crime Wave That Never Came
This episode of Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours examines the rise and impact of the juvenile “super-predator” myth through two influential 1990s articles by John DiIulio. Using these texts as cultural artifacts, the episode explor...
S 1 E 5 "The Calls Are Coming from Inside the House": Black Christmas (1974) and 1970s Cultural Anxieties
Black Christmas (1974) is more than an early slasher film. It is a reflection of 1970s cultural anxiety. Set in a sorority house during the holidays, the film follows a group of young women stalked by an unseen killer whose threatening...
S 1 E 4 Houston Serial Killer Panic: The Real Cultural Anxieties
In this final episode of our four-part series on the Houston serial-killer panic of 2025, we look beyond the rumors in the bayou to examine the deeper forces shaping the city’s fear. We unpack why “targeted” violence still feels threatening in ...
S 1 E 3 Houston Serial Killer Panic: Medical Examiners' Reports and Undetermined Cases
In this episode, death investigations expert Elizabeth Gilmore takes us inside the medical examiner’s office to explain how cause and manner of death are determined—a process that is far more complex and far more critical than most people reali...
S 1 E 2 Houston Serial Killer Panic: Cultural Understandings and Empirical and Definitional Realities
This is the second episode in our four-part series on the Houston serial killer panic of 2025. This episode takes a closer look at how we think—and often misthink—about serial murder. I sit down with two criminologists who bring both clarity an...
S 1 E 1 Houston Serial Killer Panic: Serial Killers in American (Popular) Culture
This is the first episode of a four-part series on the Houston serial killer panic of 2025. This installment traces the panic’s deeper lineage, following its evolution from the serial killer anxieties of the 1970s and 1980s through the rise of ...
Introduction to the Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours Podcast
This inaugural episode of Crime & Pop Culture Office Hours introduces the podcast concept and purpose. Crime and popular culture artifacts become cultural rituals that shape our fears, values, and sense of social order. Using Video...