New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
The podcasts that stood out to me most this year, not surprisingly, were those that transported me—especially when they made me laugh. I also appreciated shows that gave me useful information in a form I could stand. In March, Covid-specific series sprang up—the one I liked best was a nearly robotic, just-the-facts situation called “Coronavirus 411”—and, as the pandemic set in, many shows made great use of the power of voices to connect listeners in isolation. Deeply reported local documentaries continued to flourish, sometimes at NPR affiliates; meanwhile, Spotify and other gargantuan parties continued to gobble up greater percentages of the podsphere, but independent creators doing truly original things thrived, too. And three long-running favorite podcasts of mine put out exceptional, must-listen episodes: the wrenching “Remembering Lynn Shelton,” on Marc Maron’s “WTF,” which Maron released two days after the death of his partner, the brilliant and beloved director Lynn Shelton; “Curtis Flowers,” in which Madeleine Baran, the reporter-host of “In the Dark,” the podcast that helped free Flowers from prison after twenty-three years, finally interviews him; and “Reply All” ’s “The Case of the Missing Hit,” which brought us unlikely joy, via a mysterious Barenaked Ladies-like earworm, as we adjusted to our new reality in March. Here’s to 2021, and may things only get better.
10. “This Sounds Serious: Grand Casino”
This was a year in which you really noticed a good laugh—what is this sound, this feeling?—and appreciated the hell out of it. What a surprise it was to listen to the satirical investigative podcast “This Sounds Serious: Grand Casino,” from Castbox and the Vancouver production company Kelly & Kelly, and laugh my head off over and over again. Scripted fictional podcasts, including satirical ones, often exude a self-serious, stagey artifice that, at least for me, can produce involuntary shuddering. But “This Sounds Serious,” now in its third season, deftly avoids these problems. Carly Pope, playing Gwen Radford, a podcaster obsessed with 911 calls, narrates with intelligence and clarity; the series pokes fun at podcast conventions, and even specific podcasts, but rarely overplays its hand. “Grand Casino” profiles a Hollywood con man, from his origins as a “con boy” to the mystery of his last great con, the would-be blockbuster “Grand Casino”; as it winds its way through the eighties, the series riffs on pop-cultural touchstones from “Sit, Ubu, sit” to Fido Dido to the guava-juice craze. The show’s writing, acting, and audio production are expertly done—“old” audio clips actually sound old, and a little distorted—and it doesn’t telegraph the jokes, which sneak up and pack a punch. When the series made its début, in 2018, with a season about a weatherman murdered in his waterbed, some listeners mistook it for true crime.
9. “LBJ and the Great Society”
In April, I appeared on “Recode Media with Peter Kafka” to talk about podcasts’ response to the pandemic, and was gently mocked when, asked to name some favorite escapist podcasts, I enthused about “LBJ and the Great Society.” But, in a time of constantly unfolding political and public-health crises, the PRX series, hosted by Melody Barnes, was rather escapist, transporting us to a world in which an outsized American President and personality drew on his considerable dealmaking skills to bring about progressive structural change. Like its predecessor, “LBJ’s War,” from 2017, it lets us eavesdrop on history—Johnson’s phone calls, Lady Bird’s audio diaries—and hear how the sausage got made. (Not long after the J.F.K. assassination, for example, Johnson strong-armed Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver into spearheading the War on Poverty: “You’ve got the responsibility, you’ve got the authority, you’ve got the power, you’ve got the money. Now, you may not have the glands.” Shriver insisted that he did—“I’ve got plenty of glands.”) The series came out before Super Tuesday, when various domestic-policy proposals were being cheered and scorned; as we head into the Biden era (!) and resume such debates, it’s well worth a listen.
8. “Dead Eyes”
The year’s most amusing podcast intro—the unmistakable voice of Bebe Neuwirth saying, “This is ‘Dead Eyes,’ a podcast about one actor’s quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO miniseries ‘Band of Brothers’ ”—is perfectly emblematic of the charm, self-awareness, and star power of this surprisingly edifying series. In it, the character actor and improv-comedy veteran Connor Ratliff (“The Chris Gethard Show,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) examines a discomfiting milestone in his life—hearing that Hanks had him fired because he has “dead eyes”—and gets peers and friends (including Tony Hale, Jon Hamm, Aimee Mann, D’Arcy Carden, and Mike Birbiglia) to reflect on career successes and failures alongside him. (Hanks is, of course, a beloved recurring theme.) It’s elegantly produced, full of funny tape (Ratliff’s former agent fondly tells him that, like James Earl Jones, he has “a voice you could eat tomato soup to”), and insightful; every time we think Ratliff is veering toward self-centered neurosis, he pulls the frame back to make his story universal again, in ways we might not want to admit. As he says to the actor-comedian Lauren Lapkus, who once cast Ratliff as a character called Pathetic Man in a comedy special, “It makes me less insecure to know that everybody’s insecure.”
7. “Wind of Change”
The best podcasts often help us see something anew—“Cops,” sleep, an old Moby album—and, to the surprise of many of us, this year that included “Wind of Change,” the 1990 perestroika-focussed power ballad by the German hair-metal band the Scorpions, whose piercing whistle and anthemic force inspired millions of Soviet and European “children of tomorrow” to “ring the freedom bell.” The podcast “Wind of Change,” from the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, Pineapple Street Studios, Spotify, and Crooked Media, investigates a juicy rumor: was the C.I.A. secretly responsible for writing the song? Combining the joy of chasing down answers with the glee of embarking on a whimsical quest, Keefe takes listeners on an adventure around the world and through Cold War history. Though it takes the form of a romp, mightily enhanced by the production chops of Henry Molofsky, “Wind of Change” gets us thinking about the role of culture, and specifically music, in influencing hearts and minds.
6. “Articles of Interest”
This year, Avery Trufelman, a longtime reporter and producer for “99% Invisible” and the current host of “The Cut,” returned with the second season of her limited series “Articles of Interest,” which not only continued to engage me with a topic I’d never thought I cared much about—clothing—but changed the way I thought about, of all things, luxury. The season begins with a museum’s collection of creepy dolls and its role in the preservation of fashion in postwar France; it goes on to consider ideas about beauty, value, and specialness with episodes about knockoffs (via the influential Harlem designer Dapper Dan), diamonds, suits, perfume, and wedding dresses. In exploring how our desires can manifest themselves “in strange and seemingly frivolous ways,” Trufelman illustrates how essential those desires truly are.
5. “Nice White Parents,” “Fiasco: The Battle for Boston,” “The Promise”
Three outstanding podcasts this year—unrelated but complementary—delved into the pervasive race-correlated inequity of American public schools. In “Nice White Parents,” from Serial Productions and the Times, Chana Joffe-Walt presents the history of a single middle school in Brooklyn, using its story to illustrate the ways in which white parents, often unwittingly and under a cloak of “innocence” or naïveté, have contributed to structural inequality while trying to improve educational opportunities for their own kids. Leon Neyfakh’s “Fiasco: The Battle for Boston,” on Luminary, expertly applies the artful historical-reanalysis approach he honed on “Slow Burn” and previous seasons of “Fiasco” to illuminate the Boston school-desegregation crisis of the seventies; the results are riveting and narratively rich. And the second season of Meribah Knight’s “The Promise,” from Nashville Public Radio, employs the investigative thoroughness she demonstrated in the show’s first season, about inequity surrounding the redevelopment of a Nashville public-housing project, and directs it toward the study of two vastly unequal neighborhood schools. Each series makes excellent use of telling detail, vivid scene-setting, and lively interview tape from parents, politicians, and students. At their most fundamental level, the shows challenge the listeners’ own naïveté—especially, one imagines, white listeners’ naïveté—and help us confront the de-facto relevance of an old term: segregation.
4. “Lost Notes: 1980”
Written and performed by the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, “Lost Notes: 1980,” the new season of KCRW’s music-documentary podcast, revisits unexpected moments in pop music—a posthumous album from Minnie Riperton; the concurrent deaths of Darby Crash, of the Germs, and John Lennon; the self-reinvention of Grace Jones; the mainstreaming of rap—during that single, transformational year. Many highly produced narrative-nonfiction podcasts seek to succeed both as journalism and art; this one achieves it. An extended meditation on house parties and d.j.ing during an episode about the Sugarhill Gang provides sense memories of packed dance floors, samples that inspire a leap off a couch, and the ecstasy of a good sweaty crowd.
“Unfinished: Short Creek,” from Witness Docs and Critical Frequency, is the rare narrative about a cultlike situation that doesn’t feel at all voyeuristic; the sensitivity and care of its hosts, Ash Sanders and Sarah Ventre, are evident throughout. They spent four and a half years reporting on a community of fundamentalist, polygamist Mormons in Short Creek, on the Utah-Arizona border, the leader of which, Warren Jeffs, is now serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting a minor. The interviews are intimate and powerful, especially in the case of Elissa Wall, who suffered abuse as a child bride, escaped her marriage and the church, and testified against Jeffs. The series is enhanced by John DeLore’s excellent sound design, which includes a lovely, subtle score and the sounds of children singing about church elders. (“These are the things that Uncle Roy has taught us. . . .”) The show grounds its study of extremes and institutionalized power in everyday detail (watermelon-eating, “Weekend at Bernie’s”)—and, as Sanders observes, it increasingly reveals itself to be a tale not just of otherness but of “America with the volume turned up.”
The veteran investigative podcast “Reveal,” hosted by Al Letson, launched its first serialized work this year, and it’s a knockout. Reported by Shoshana Walter, Laura Starecheski, and Ike Sriskandarajah, it’s a head-spinning exposé of Cenikor, a nationwide chain of substance-abuse rehab facilities that use “work therapy” to effectively trap participants in indentured servitude. “American Rehab” ties together, with chilling efficiency, the opioid epidemic, the prison-industrial complex, and corporate abuse of power; according to the podcast, Cenikor has sent workers to employers including Exxon, a flak-jacket manufacturer, and the Houston Oilers. (Like the Jeffrey Epstein saga, learning about it can make you feel like a conspiracy theorist.) But the series is also full of compelling, and sometimes funny, characters; Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda’s terrific sound design weaves in jazz by mid-century program participants and the maddening bootstraps rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. It pulls off the impressive feat of entertaining, educating, and infuriating us at the same time.
1. “Floodlines”
“Floodlines,” from The Atlantic, reported and hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II, is a triumph on every level, detailing an epic tragedy—New Orleans after Katrina, when the levees broke—with the majesty of a novel. Newkirk, a wise, personable presence with a sense of humor, roots his study in characters on the ground, introducing us to locals including a Treme evacuee, a Charity Hospital nurse, and a “smooth, ageless” Seventh Ward booster. As a journalist with a master’s in public health, he inspects the failures of planning, communication, and federal disaster response with a bracing moral clarity, but he also trusts listeners to think for themselves. The final episode, featuring enraging audio from an exhibit at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Newkirk’s interview with the notorious former FEMA director Michael (“Heckuva job”) Brown, is stunning in its power and restraint. The quality of the series’ reporting and storytelling is matched by its music, by Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah and Anthony Braxton, and sound design, by David Herman; its coming-of-the-hurricane moment is the most beautiful audio sequence I heard this year.
2020 in Review
- The funniest cartoons, as chosen by our Instagram followers.
- Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks.
- Doreen St. Félix selects the year’s best TV shows.
- Richard Brody lists his top thirty-six movies.
- Ian Crouch recounts the best jokes of the year.
- Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate a lost plague year.
- New Yorker writers on the best books they read this year.
- Amanda Petrusich counts down the best music.
- Michael Schulman on ten great performances.
