October 16, 2018

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THE LIST

What happens when the outward facing charisma and charm of a loved one falls drastically short of the decisions that person makes? We all lie a little, executing some measure of personal skeleton masking, but it turns out that we don't all make a fortune and then blow it all leaving a family behind with nothing except the crippling edifice of wealth and and empty bank account. Oh, and a staggering amount of taped conversations with the man who seemingly conned away the fortune of a once-upon-a-time mogul. I'm totally captivated by this miniseries from the perspective of a daughter making sense of her father's checkered past. 

One of the more in-your-face Criminal episodes in recent memory, this affair commemorating the century mark in draws us in with the exploits of a failed airplane hijacker. Apparently at a point in the not-so-distant past such a crime was almost routine, normalized by a commercial air travel industry struggling to define the line between convenience and safety. This quirky subculture alone would have made for a satisfying half hour, but leave it to Phoebe Judge to up the ante by interviewing a perp and leave us hanging mid-crime. Check out #100 and just try not to be stoked for #101.
This excellent debut of an excellent show (then helmed by David Plotz) follows Stephen Colbert through the routine of putting on a parody news show five nights a week. Anyone who fell in love with this pundit caricature back in the mid-2000s will delight in this insidery piece of audio, but frankly it's not even a requirement to know who Colbert is in order to glean something from this piece. More than following a celebrity through a self-serving monologue, this inaugural episode from 2014 does what the show sets out to do: find out how people spend their day at work. 

HONORABLE MENTION

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