Not much that I used to like but don’t anymore. What I like: Crimetown (about corruption in Providence RI) might be the best podcast i’ve ever listened to. Tied with “You Must remember this” about the Golden age of Hollywood. Mona Charon and Jay Nordlinger have a good podcast called “Need to know” about Conservatism (real, not the Trump kind). NPR Politics podcast, Gilbert gottfried, Maron, NYTimes Daily, hardcore history, BBC “In our time,” Tim Keller sermons (he’s a recently retired Presbyterian minister in NY).
I hate podcasts that do a live audience episode. It seems so weird. I don’t get it. I love Stuff You Should Know, I like the banter between the hosts, but it’s just weird that they would go on stage in front of an audience to do an otherwise ordinary episode.
There are also a lot of How Stuff Works podcasts that really suck at hiding the fact the hosts are reading a script, “what you missed in history class”, and “part-time genius” are unlistenable because of this.
I’m a huge fan of the Nerdist (trying hard not to be overly defensive) but the thing that annoys me about the “Talking with Chris Hardwick” episodes is they don’t even try to clue listeners in to what’s going on visually. It’s just a constant reminder that you’re not getting the content in its optimal medium - so why release it as solely audio at all?
I dropped Hollywood Babble-On for the same reason but during the election. They spent so much time bringing up Trump news stories for the podcast which made no sense except for the fact it was easy to use them to eat-up time on the podcast. Then I realized that Ralph Garmen’s impressions weren’t suppose to be bad on purpose, he actually does hack impressions horribly and he thinks he’s doing good ones.