December 18, 2018
This week I'm switching up the format a bit. There are still top episodes (without any explanatory text), but in Something New we've got a year-end blowout of shows I've caught but haven't had time to write about at any length. This is born out of both a desire to experiment and my lack of available time to devote to the cause. But let me know what you think, it may be the way to go in 2019...
THE LIST
THE LIST
HONORABLE MENTION
SOMETHING NEW
The story of Aaron Hernandez, football star and convicted murderer, just sucked me in. I knew what happened in the end, but I guess my lack of familiarity with Hernandez pre-arrest made everything feel revelatory. It turned out to be a bit less of an indictment on the sports industrial complex than I’d anticipated (especially given the subtitle), although the episode centered on University of Florida was absolutely riveting on that front. Maybe it is the implicit authoritative presence of The Boston Globe, but it feels very different than some of the more salacious true-crime podcasts out there.
Host Shea Serrano and a revolving panel of guests analyze movie villains, getting down to the essence of what makes a person evil. This is my first experience with a non-sports podcast from the Ringer (props to The Ringer NBA Show and The Bill Simmons Podcast), and it’s a fun, discursive pop culture romp. The approach is both loose and regimented, a good recipe for fostering chemistry that comes through in the end product. It looks like this is destined to be a seven part first season, with a villain from all sorts of different genres, but the potential is basically endless and I’d love to see more as the different segments start to congeal.
Could there be anything more benign that a podcast about overpriced sweetened grain? It does sound like a pretty dry concept for a show, but the folks behind My Brother My Brother and Me have crafted something novel - part trade publication for cereal enthusiasts and part mindful meditation...all centering around sugary goodness.
Radiotopia’s Showcase rounded out their year with this miniseries covering the black diaspora. It’s a little like Code Switch, a bit like The Nod and a really compelling window into what it’s like to be someone in a world that largely doesn’t understand who you are and how you live. Interracial dating, the evolution of a people’s vernacular, and coded body language are all on offer throughout these four parts. But if you're craving more, the show has dropped 21 episodes to date (available via the above link).
This show is the first in an ambitious model from USA Today, which attempts to frame a city through the lens of a particular longform story. The inaugural season placed Chicago in the spotlight, delivering lots of crime and politics and injustice...in a way that is mostly intriguing and not totally depressing. It doesn’t have the same entrancing pull as Gladiator (the other newsroom-driven show featured here), but that’s perhaps the mark of a show geared more toward integrating past and present urban realities than crafting a post-mortem “how did this happen?” type vehicle. I'm really intrigued by the upcoming second season, which will star Reno, Nevada.
Host Shea Serrano and a revolving panel of guests analyze movie villains, getting down to the essence of what makes a person evil. This is my first experience with a non-sports podcast from the Ringer (props to The Ringer NBA Show and The Bill Simmons Podcast), and it’s a fun, discursive pop culture romp. The approach is both loose and regimented, a good recipe for fostering chemistry that comes through in the end product. It looks like this is destined to be a seven part first season, with a villain from all sorts of different genres, but the potential is basically endless and I’d love to see more as the different segments start to congeal.
This documentary is set inside a year-long attempt at simulating conditions for life on Mars. Except that the host is only given recordings sent from the crew, enabling a dutiful glimpse of life in close quarters but not a lot of big picture implications of the mission. There is a decent amount of reality-TV-esque drama and a disappointing amount of focus on the empirical research gleaned from the experiment. Conceptually it has a lot of potential, but with limited access it's hard to create that need-to-listen feeling which I lacked after the conclusion of most episodes.
This is one of my favorite new shows from 2018. It comes close to something that’s a backburner life goal of mine - to unite diehard sports fans who herald devotion to a team as life’s most sacred goal, and those who insist on using the word sportsball to signal their ignorance and implicit superiority. Professional basketball is the backdrop for Horse, but as the tagline goes, “basketball is so much more than what happens on the court.” It would be one thing if this were simply a panel discussion on the various off-court storylines that surround the NBA, but Horse is hosted by two dudes that clearly know and love all parts of the entertainment culture.
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