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”
