Anyone have any True Crime recs? I’m an addict and I need more.
Sword and Scale and Generation Why are my favorites. I recently started In the Dark (about the Jacob Wetterling case) and it’s very good so far.
The only podcast I listen to is 99 Percent Invisible (mostly design, urbanism, architecture).
Most others are just too long or full of themselves. As some said, being interesting for 30 minutes every week is hard, even if you’re really interesting.
99PI is my traffic-is-getting-to-me survival tool. Just pop it up and let Roman Mars’ voice calm you.
There are definitely some that ‘ought’ to be good for me, that I tried out but unsubscribed, because they apparently Do Not Edit. Look, I’m glad you and your compadres had fun sitting around the table recording this. I do not need to hear every joke, aside, miscue, and fumble-around-the-point. Giving basic background to your points is fine, but make it snappy.
This is me. I’ve been listening to podcasts since 2005 and frequently find I need to overhaul my list as they aren’t making me happy anymore. I listened to Filmspotting from 2005-earlier this year and suddenly thought, “I know what they are going to say, I never get to see the movies they love anyway, I’m not enjoying this.” So I stopped. But I have literally done that to 40-50 other podcasts that I have listened to at least dozens of episodes for ( I commute two hours every day and used to work in a lab where I listened to podcasts and audiobooks for hours and hours every day.)
Even NPR shows start to get old after a while… I cheered when Oliver Sachs died just so Radiolab and NPR wouldn’t have him on anymore. Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson are similarly overdone by public broadcasting. I don’t dislike any of them at all, but I always like fresh perspectives and science is an area that I pay particular attention to.
One that I’m curious about how I will like it in a year or two is “No such thing as a fish”. Their conceit of bringing in 4 facts to riff around every week seems to keep it fresh as well as their trying to keep the show factual and not always go the gross or sex direction seems to be working. The team actually got a late night BBC show using the same format to have a comedic conversation about the week’s news.
When I first started listening it was one hour long and devoted almost entirely to film reviews with just a little naturally-occurring banter. They have since expanded it to two hours, and filled it with celebrity interviews and trying-too-hard-to-be-clever listener emails. I still listen to it, but I think it was much better when it was a tight one hour.
Have you listened to Criminal?
You might like Criminal - they mainly cover small scale little known crime stories, so you won’t find Charles Manson there, but they are usually fairly interesting.
ETA: Freakin ninjas :mad:
Speaking of Charles Manson, you must listen to the epic 12-episode series on the Manson murders on the You Must Remember This podcast.
Thanks for the recs, I had not heard of Criminal or You Must Remember This.
Doesn’t this decline in quality happen to 90% of things in the field of entertainment? Friends and I were discussing the same phenomenon with bands a few days ago. They put out a couple of great albums, look like they’ll go on for ever but only a few do. The rest start to do songs about politics or being rich. Most TV shows run out of stuff after a year or two. I don’t know how many writers I have eagerly followed through several books and then lost interest.
You Must Remember This is a podcast about the old days of Hollywood and movies, not crime generally - but their series on the Manson story (which of course is connected to that world) is really great.
I mostly do get podcasts only of programming created for broadcast like Wait Wait…, Ask Me Another, TED Radio Hour, Science Friday and the like, because…
Damn right… people need to be reminded of the value of actual production work…
I have been enjoying My Favorite Murder but the two women who host do take a little getting used to. They source a podcast called Last Podcast on the Left sometimes so while I have never listened to it I have checked it out online and that is another one that does True Crime (not exclusively though).
You appear to like quiz and science for shows. You might want to check out BBC Radio 4 podcasts. Brain of Britain, Counterpoint, More or Less, Science In Action, and News Quiz are my favorites. Oh, and The Infinite Monkey Cage. They are done like BBC TV shows, they do a series then stop for a while, with something else on the feed.
Radiolab is still great, and I assume so is Dan Carlin. But my favorite might be the little-known (but always entertaining and well-researched) mom-and-pop operation called Futility Closet. (I loved the web blog years before they started podcasting). It’s mainly about not-very-famous but fascinating episodes from history, typically sometime between 1820 and 1950.
ive noticed this happens in blogs a lot too I follow…they start out good but after a while it seems real life gets in the way and theres more “classic"or encore” post after a year or two…
Or they run out of topics …
I got turned off, a while back, by Dan Carlin’s pontifications on a certain subject. Not because I disagreed, but because he appeared startlingly unaware of some relevant facts. Smart guy, no doubt, but I happened to hit a spot where, for me, he revealed he wasn’t as knowledgeable as he believed or portrayed himself to be. Maybe I made too much of it, but the bottom line is it was ruined; I dropped both his shows.
But hey. As I said, there is no shortage of stuff to listen to. I’ve more than replaced Carlin’s time in my sched already, but Futility Closet looks like it could be fun. Maybe something like a longer-form Memory Palace. Anyway, I’ve downloaded three eps, I’ll check it out.
You didn’t mention it, but everyone seems to have heard of Serial. An unrelated group of lawyers did a podcast about some of the legal background surrounding Adnan’s case called Undisclosed. It dives pretty deep into the minutia, but isn’t horribly dry and boring. Your opinion of the case against Adnan will probably be very different after listening to Undisclosed. I suggest listening to Serial first, otherwise you’ll be very lost. Serial has some interviews with the people involved, so you get a much better sense of the person rather than just being a name in a legal brief.
I don’t know it We Hate Movies is going to shit or if its always been like this. I kind of like the podcast, they talk about bad movies and review current ones. They don’t really review the movies though when they talk about them so it’s four indistinctive white guys all trying to get their yucks in on a particular subject. Sometimes its funny but often they stray too far because their busy doing bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions or whatever. I would enjoy it more if they tightened it up a bit and have one of them host the reviews more strongly.
Plus they said that Mortal Kombat was a bad film. WTF?
I tried to listen to Radiolab but found the voices and smug tone grating. The content seems top notch but I just couldn’t keep listening after the first one or two.