Knowing that Toxic: The Britney Spears Story has a happy ending isn’t a spoiler. (And a special shoutout to Dan Taberski, the first host to ever earn two of our top-five spots.) They pushed the form, helped us metabolize the world around us (or escape from it), and embodied the spirit of 2021. The 50 shows on this list outdid their competitors in both ambition and success. Producers zeroed in on terrorism-both domestic and abroad-searching for patterns and reaching for hindsight. Others drew parallels between the pandemic and the AIDS crisis or the aftermath of 9/11. Some shows were hornier than ever before others sharply connected sex to gendered power dynamics. In other series, our houses themselves-and the attendant challenges around gentrification and homelessness- were the story. Memoirs also shone, allowing homebound producers to shout into the void. As the pandemic wore on and limited field reporting, archival tape became central to narratives. This year, makers played with structure in fresh ways, flirting with form and cadence. As always, we’ve also recused ourselves from selecting The Atlantic’s podcasts. True-crime shows and in-depth looks at government snafus remain available in droves, but we sought series that transcended their genre conventions. We’ve decided to eliminate anything that sounds like it’s always sounded, too. The requisites for inclusion on our list have evolved over time, and now we only consider new shows or shows that have a new focus. Ours is, as far as we know, the longest-running of the robust roundups, and we’ve been reviewing the medium longer than virtually any other critic in the space. This is our seventh list commemorating the year’s best podcasts, and deciding what makes the cut has only gotten harder each time. From there, each and every slot is labored over and debated. (Of course, with more than a million podcasts in existence, our extensive listening still makes only a tiny dent.) To track our impressions, we make a spreadsheet with legends, drop-down menus, color codes, formulas, and notes on the thousands of podcasts that we’ve discovered over the past decade. We seek shows anywhere we can find them-sometimes hearing about them directly from producers, other times from a friend of a friend’s mother’s uncle, or sometimes through our own secret methods of rooting out gems. And our sources for entrusting us to tell their stories.Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2021” coverage here. Was Fred a monster, masquerading as the perfect Malibu dad - or was an innocent man convicted by his gossiping neighbors?īut more important than any year-end list is the support and loyalty of our listeners. But a phone call from a Malibu neighbor changed everything. Initially, the deaths were ruled accidental. Verna’s husband, Fred Roehler, was the sole survivor and only witness. Variety: Season 2 of the true-crime series, hosted by New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear, focuses on the suspicious drowning in January 1981 of Verna Johnson-Roehler and her young son, Doug, while boating 30 miles off the coast of Malibu. Strangeland isa brilliant example of how true crime can contain surprising depth. Choi, who is Korean American, translates and provides cultural context about how Koreans tend to view obligations to family, to neighbors, and to strangers. Though someone was convicted of the triple homicide, the show casts doubts on that verdict. ![]() ![]() In 2003, in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, a woman named Chi Hyon Song, her 2-year-old son, and her nanny, Eun Sik Min, were murdered. But hosts Sharon Choi and Ben Adair avoid the predictable, turning the show into a thoughtful meditation on race, culture, and immigration. The Atlantic: Strangeland is a true-crime show that involves some familiar threads: evidence gathering, suspect lineup, investigation critique. Two of our favorite mentions come from The Atlantic on Strangeland, and Variety on Lost Hills. Western Sound shows made a number of year-end best of lists.
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