Aural Fixation
The Best Fiction Podcasts — Winter 2019
The Best Fiction Podcasts — Winter 2019
I’m now hooked on high-end, high-quality, Hollywood-style narrative fiction podcasts, for lack of a better term. I credit the journalist and close friend Sara Stewart — and to road trips aboard the Sapphire Dragon, my new-for-me car after 20 years of not owning a vehicle. (Read more about my meet-cute with the dragon here.)
While preparing for the eight-hour drive to New York City from Sara’s home in the cute college town Indiana, Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh, she recommended I download Homecoming. It’s a narrative fiction podcast starring Catherine Keener and Oscar Isaac. It did so well in audio-land that it made the leap to Amazon Prime streaming, starring Julia Roberts.
I boarded the dragon, hit play and shifted into first. (Yes, I drive a manual transmission in the 21st Century. It’s my bid to shore up my masculine identity, and to forestall the eventual takeover of SkyNet.)
Homecoming describes a secret government program to manipulate traumatized Iraq and Afghanistan vets — and their therapists. It’s intimate, well-produced, features Hollywood leads and has a plot that worms its way into your imagination. It kept me company during the long haul to New York and kicked off my obsession with audio fiction.
The truly best, top-tier narrative fiction podcasts are cinematic in the full sense of the term, minus the one small detail of no photography. Like quality Hollywood TV series, they feature well-structured stories with tension, relatable characters, and clear narrative arcs that span a season of at least ten episodes of around 30 minutes. They boast high production values with great special effects, tight editing, thematic music and the same top talent you’ll see on screen. (The exact same talent. So far, there haven’t been any breakout podcast fiction stars who have gone from audio to streaming, but there’s still time.) These podcasts are not two guys yakking into a microphone for two hours about sports, or a self described influencer giving meandering celebrity interviews.
These are high-budget, labor-intensive, rare works of commercial art. They have emerged as paradiscal islands in the vast seas of over 700,000 podcasts now online. A few top tier production companies have emerged who craft these stories, like the massive Gimlet Media and smaller shops like The Wondery, QCode, Endeavour Audio and Radiotopia. I’m sure there are a more for me to discover, or that will launch in this coming year. I’d like to do this too if anyone wants to reach out to me.
What’s the big deal about exactly? There are many, many, many lower tier fiction podcasts crowding the internet. They’re mostly horror stories, sci-fi shorts and even my favorite genre: rom-coms. (Yes, I’m a tender butterfly.) This article isn’t about that fat middle section of online fiction content. I’ve come across hundreds of these middling stories produced by smaller podcast production companies, like The Whisperforge. I’m sure some are gems and I’m being unfair, but I haven’t found any that have hooked me yet.
This article is a collection of my favorite high-end, well-produced narrative fiction podcasts as of Christmas 2019. If you enjoy them or have other suggestions of shows I’ve missed, please write a comment. And if you want to know more about the Sapphire Dragon, I’m always thrilled to talk about the joys of three-pedal driving.
Homecoming 2016 — Gimlet Media: This is the earliest fiction podcast I know of and it put the art form on the map. It’s like the Serial of high end podcast fiction.
To take a step back, all high end audio fiction owes a debt to the incredibly well-realized radio plays from the early half of the 20th Century. Scripted radio shows, that predate television, aired nightly over the radio-only broadcast networks: NBC, ABC and CBS. I like to think that the high end narrative fiction podcasts of this era, like Homecoming, pick up where the radio shows Dragnet, X Minus 1, the Life of Riley and many more dropped off.
Homecoming debuted in the fall of 2016, eventually spanning two seasons. Like a lot of fiction podcasts, action sequences and multiple characters with similar voices can be tricky to follow; but you spend most of the episodes listening to easy-to-track interviews between a therapist, Catherine Keener, and her traumatized combat veteran patient, Oscar Isaac.
They’re all great performances, but for me, David Schwimmer delivers the strongest performance as Keener’s morally-suspect handler. Amy Sedaris appears in the second season, she’s terrific each time she barks into the microphone. I think the immense talent overshadows the thin plot, but it’s worth a listen.
For a tech aside, as one of those oddball Android Pixel/Google Fi users, I first listened to podcasts via the Stitcher app. I switched to Spotify after they bought Gimlet Media for $200 million in February 2019. Spotify is easy enough to use and now has an enormous podcast library.
OK, onto my next step of the journey:
Marvel’s Wolverine 2018 & 2019— There are now two independent seasons, totally separate shows really, from Marvel Studios working with Stitcher. Both chronicle a cranky, world-weary, ferocious Wolverine as he goes on noirish adventures in mutant-land. He reluctantly saves good guys, slashes baddies and maintains his signature crusty, pissed off attitude. I’m not a rabid fan of the Marvel Universe (hat tip to Martin Scorsese’s lashing of movies not films), but these Wolverine seasons are well done, dark, and fun movies (not films) for your ears.
Richard Armitage plays a gruff Logan and he’s well supported with a large cast of seconds. The production values are some of the best I’ve heard — amazing special effects, lots of characters and a complex but followable story: Wolverine is on the run, teams up with unlikely allies and slices his way to justice. My guess is more seasons will come.
The Edge of Sleep 2019 — This is a really crazy apocalyptic story about a world wherever everyone dies the moment they fall asleep. It’s sort of like The Walking Dead, but with sleep. And no zombies. And very few swords. In any event, it’s seven episodes go by fast, save the abstract dream sequences with whales that are beautifully rendered but very hard to follow.
All in all, I absolutely loved The Edge of Sleep. It’s so strange and winding I need to give it another listen. It features a small band of survivors who have to stay awake to save themselves, each minute that ticks by means they’re one step closer to proving Nas was right: sleep is the cousin of death.
The Edge Of Sleep comes from to QCode Media in Los Angeles. It’s an emerging production powerhouse built by various Hollywood big shots with impressives resumes whom I won’t pretend to know or follow. They somehow relate to the Endeavour talent agency and some other film productions companies. Let’s just say they have a knack for excellent storytelling. Everything they do is great.
QCode notably produced Blackout with Rami Malek and Carrier with Cynthia Erivo. They deserve their own entries. They’re all terrific, but, to me, The Edge of Sleep is their best effort yet.
It features smaller name Hollywood actors but the town is full of talent. The writing, sound effects, editing and overall storytelling is all fantastic. I even emailed the writer, the menschy Jake Emanuel, who kindly tolerated my fan mail and pitch for a rom-com podcast that went nowhere. Hope springs eternal.
Motherhacker 2019. Speaking of more of my impossible romances, please meet my girlfriend Carrie Coon. She stars in Motherhacker, a wildly compelling, true-to-life miniseries about a con artist mom. Carrie Coon doesn’t know I exist, so my ardor is more of an unrequited appreciation from afar, but I did see her once at Via Carota in the West Village. That was a great if fleeting moment. I digress.
Coon starred in HBO’s so-disturbing-you-just-can’t-look-away The Leftovers, with Justin Theroux. Whom I’ve also seen in the West Village, on his gold bicycle. Anyway… The Leftovers put Coon on my map but of course she’s been at this for a long time now. I loved her performance in season two of The Sinner. I could go on.
Gimlet Media’s Motherhacker has unusually short episodes, around 13 minutes each. We’re living in an age of podcast storytelling experimentation. What’s also different is the story is true-to-life. No zombies or mutants, no robots or secret government agents. Logline: a harried mom is underwater financially and gets thrown a lifeline. Or is it a lure?
Motherhacker is one of my favorites. I can’t wait to re-listen the next time I board the Sapphire Dragon to fly over the countryside, terrifying villagers and torching enemies. Or you know, driving up the highway and eating lunch at a soul-crushing service plaza.
Hunted 2019— I’m still listening as new episodes come out in December 2019, but this is my new favorite. Parker Posey starts in a gunslinging tale of federal marshalls hunting down bad guys. It’s produced by Dick Wolf — or his son really. Predictably from Wolf Entertainment, it’s a perfectly structured police procedural.
What’s nice to see, er, hear is that these podcast creators have learned to better tell aural fiction stories. One of my biggest challenges is keeping multiple characters straight. And action scenes are almost impossible to track. Hunted features actors who have been directed to use distinctly different voices. They’re all very easy to follow, even if it gets cartoonish with a strung out junkie bad guy or a hyper macho FBI agent. Regardless, Parker Posey sounds great with a twang, you’d never guess she lives in Manhattan. (I’m sure you’ll be so fascinated to hear that I also saw her once in the West Village, and even looked after her dog as she grabbed a coffee at Stumptown. Told you. Thrilling.)
Parker Posey plays a marshall hunting escaped prisoners, and guess what? Her boss makes her job harder for her and wants to bench her! Her homelife is a mess! But she’s the only one human in the world who can deliver justice, despite working for the enormous Federal government with lots of equally trained employees! You’ve literally heard this all before — it’s Wolf Entertainment, nor Warhol’s Factory — but it’s well-made. Roller coasters are fun even if they go nowhere.
Passenger List 2019 — My last recommendation in no particular order is Radiotopia’s Passenger List, about a college student who plays DIY private investigator. She tracks down a vanished plane that carried her twin brother. Did it crash? Why were some of the passengers using fake passports? Why is the government covering it up?
Kelly Marie Tran, the first woman of color in the Star Wars saga, deftly handles her character’s lonely role of chasing leads and avoiding red herrings as she seeks to understand her brother’s fate — and of all those who vanished with him. It’s not the most mind-blowing story, but in the era after the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 in 2014, it has an eerie resonance.
Like all the other shows in this list, it’s highly produced, stars immensely talented professional actors and while this one is short on sound effect trickery, it’s very well produced. I hope a season 2 is in the works.
I particularly stories in this new era with, gasp, women of color as leads! Call me crazy, but it’s refreshing and more interesting to have stories told by more than just straight white males, which I am. It’s thrilling to hear stories told by everyone. I’m sure we’ll have more non-binary leads, gay protagonists and more in the years to come.
I’ll keep listening and post additional reviews soon. That’s it for now.
Special mention: Detective Trapp and it’s narrative predecessor, Dirty John, from The Wondery. Trapp gets gruesome with its tale of murdered prostitutes, but they’re very well told, true-life noirs by Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times journalist Christopher Goffard.