Bingey List 2024 : Best Podcasts of 2024

My top 15 pics for 2024, full of noteworthy, bingeworthy, provocative, brave, unforgettable and sometimes just plainly bizzare stories

Well, that’s a wrap. From a year with more twists and turns than a log ride at an amusement park—including the splash at the end—2024 is drawing to a close.

It’s been a year with more and continued volatility in the podcast space. But there are also new opportunities, old things come back to life, new gatherings, and as you will discover in this curated list, a whole lot of incredible new shows. Here we are. We did it.

Inside this list, and the subsequent research that I did for every post, I was able to spot more trends, patterns and repeat concepts than I’m able to fully outline here.

• I see a marked shift towards creative decision making; maybe there’s a 'why not try this’ ethos

• It became notable the number of producers and creators that I met who also work in Academia—not a place with huge salaries and ownership shares—but perhaps that’s now a stable job in the sea of changing business models

• I noted that the outlets for podcast criticism emaciated another level; Nick Quah announced that while he expands his critic voice into new formats we should expect less about podcasts from him, and Hot Pod just didn’t return (despite their ‘stuned tuned’ message).

Stay with me folks! I’m here here for the duration. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber to help keep this one alive.

Independence Day

It is also observable—which is perhaps my own leaning—many of the producers I interviewed made most of, if not all of, their series independently, before they even shopped it around to distributors. The world of acquisitions is quietly upon us.

Also frequently observed on the podcast art: multiple distributors and producing partners involved in each show. Double and triple partnerships, with their long credit rolls, have largely replaced the single entity original production.

And lastly, I note a trend away from the traditional true crime format; more producers and industry companions seem more willing to publish stories that don’t strictly tear from that genre.

And above all, despite everything, I feel hope for this genre, and this industry, in the wake of tremendous upheaval. I hear many creative risks paying off. I’ve been charmed and dazzled by stories that sweep me away to another land, compel me to see the world in new ways, and produce thoughtful, important journalism.

All of the series that you see featured here were published in the calendar year 2024. They are all serialized multi-episode series.

Let’s count this down, shall we?

15 - Shell Game

Evan Ratliff’s new indie podcast Shell Game reveals a strange and unsettling version of the future. Think of those annoying telemarketing scams. If you bother to pick up it’s usually the Amazon Security Team or Visa Fraud Enforcement Department. Ratliff asks: what if you outsourced these calls to an AI voice assistant? And thus a voice clone of Evan Ratliff was born. To me, and likely most English-speaking individuals, his AI voice clone sounds absurdly obvious. But once the latency issues and repetitive phrasing are fixed, woah. Something big is coming—I’m just not sure what. The use case for this is weak now; AI chats with scammy telemarketers don’t excite me. But ask me again in five years. Hats off to the producers who endured hours of AI Evan. Even the small bit you hear in the series is brain-melting. Their work is done. Land, ahoy. The future is here.

Reported / Hosted by Evan Ratliff
Produced and Distributed Independently
6 Episodes

14 - Pack One Bag

In this ambitious 10-part series, Producer David Modigliani mines two generations of his family’s history of a family torn apart by war. He manages to unearth a box of letters: ones written between brothers, and others between young lovers. Pack One Bag weaves these letters to form the narrative thread of the series. An oddly a close connection with Benito Mussolini was discovered, which demonstrates his flip-flop status that left many Italian Jewish families wondering: Should we stay or should we go now? This series has a delightful blending of fact and fiction in what could be called “creative non-fiction.” Elements here include Modigliani hilariously voicing both his grandparents, and the voice of his uncle played by Stanley Tucci. It’s a multi-generational love story for the ages.

Producer / Host: David Modigliani
Produced by Gilded Audio | Distributed by Lemonada
10 Episodes

13 - Hysterical

There aren’t many hosts who have continuously published for a decade. In this turbulent year, it was somehow comforting to hear Dan Taberski back to his usual tricks. Hysterical investigates an odd phenomenon that appeared when a group of teenage girls from a small town developed a condition that involved dramatic Tourette Syndrome-style ticks. Was it real? And if it was, what was it? An undocumented neurological disorder? A new crazy virus? Or was it actually just another case of mass hysteria? Taburski was there to ask all the questions. It was somehow fitting that this series put the Salem Witch Trials back into the zeitgeist. A curious mystery emerges, which may or may not be solved by the end. Either way, it was nice to hang with Taberski and appreciate his continuity with Pineapple Street Studios one decade later.

Produced/Hosted by Dan Taberski
Produced and Distributed: Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios
7 Episodes

12 - Inconceivable Truth

An unlikely feel-good mystery unfolds when host and producer Matt Katz, our unsuspecting family member, mails off a 23andme DNA test. This was meant to be a short gag, a confirmation of his Jewish identity. Instead, the genetic response was not what he expected. Nor for his mother, who should know. Of note here is how recent basic reproductive rights are for women—the late 1970s. This terrain of personal stories is better known for eviscerating someone’s life and leaving it to rot in a ditch somewhere. But Inconceivable Truth takes it down a completely different road. A fresh take on the popular sub-genre Who’s Your Daddy, this series allows for space and humility, trust and redemption, in a story that was easy to imagine going sideways. Listen up: This is how to solve great family divides.

Reported / Hosted by Matt Katz
Produced and Distributed: Wavland and Rococo Punch
8 Episodes

11 - The Good Whale

Meet Keiko, perhaps the only Mexican Killer Whale (they are not typically a Gulf of Mexico species), and definitely the only Killer Whale with a PR person. When the film Free Willy came out in 1993, Warner Bros had a surprise hit movie on its hands. Great, but…now the world knew about this emaciated whale, and a new a PR problem in search of a solution. Was freeing Keiko the right choice? Who would pay for it? Would he survive? Did he even speak whale? Had he done enough swimming training? The Good Whale is there for all of it. But When Keiko strikes out on his own, he shocks the world, his team of veterinarians, trainers, and comms team. The image of a giant orca on an airplane will not soon leave me. On one level, this series tells the story of a wildly ambitious science experiment; on another level, it acts as a parable for where the current human/beast boundary lies. Special mention of the whackadoodle Episode 5…coming soon to a Broadway stage near you. New business models for podcasts abound.

Reported/ Hosted by Daniel Alarcón
Produced and Distributed by Serial Productions and the NYTimes
6 Episodes

10 - Inside Kabul

This series will remind you what the Internet was built for. Celebrated French journalist Caroline Gillet watched the news footage in 2021 when the Taliban returned to control in Kabul, and wondered: what will this be like for women who live there? She then met two English-speaking women, Raha and Marwa, who bravely agreed to share voice memos of their life with Gillet over the next year to create Inside Kabul. To do this, they changed their profile names, used secure messaging platforms, only recorded in certain places and at certain times…and never spoke English in public so as not to be seen as suspicious. What emerges is an intimate account of how these two lives went in very different directions; I loved hearing how these two Afgani women learned how to “make tape.” Gillet deftly presents the tapes for the wider context. This is an English-language adaptation of the award-winning original Radio France series…in a way, it works better without the translation. Stay to the end when they finally meet each other. Skip the top-and-tail packaging for the full effect.

Reported and Hosted by Caroline Gillet
Original production: Radio France. English-Language version Canadaland
9 Episodes

9 - Home of the Brave: Beirut

Scott Carrier is one of the defining voices of radio; many have tried to sound like him. Few compare. Carrier is best known for his early work with This American Life, he carries on his classic style of go-anywhere to ask-anyone-anything in his independently produced series Home of the Brave. In early October, Carrier read the news that the war had spread into Lebanon. And then he did what almost no one else did: he bought a plane ticket to Beirut. He wanted to talk to people living through this moment in history about what was actually going on there. The style is brief, both in terms of length, but also in its style. There were no fancy production values here. No music to underscore his narration. No high-production sound design to walk the listener in. He confirmed in our interview that this mini project was truly “a Scott Carrier type-of-thing to do.”

Reported / Hosted by: Scott Carrier
Produced and Distributed Independently
7 Episodes

8 - Thrill Seekers

With authentic Love + Radio panache, Nick van der Kolk created a co-pro with CBC to find the former participants and creators of the 2005 UK reality television series Space Cadets, whose audacious conceit was that participants were competing to become the next group of space tourists. The show aired over seven consecutive nights on Channel 4 in the UK as an early Reality TV series. With Thrill Seekers, Van der Kolk does his thing here where he asks the obvious uncomfortable questions with his trademark deadpan. He’s a radio straight-man who shows impressive stamina to wait out the long and awkward silences. Bring a trowel to find it in the new CBC thread Split Screen; it’s worth the dig.

Reported / Hosted by Nick van der Kolk
Produced by Love + Radio with CBC
6 Episodes

7 - Noble

What happens when police discover more than 300 dead bodies on one property, in Noble, Georgia, and then have to work hard to figure out what law had been broken? This is possibly one of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard. Journalist Shaun Raviv manages to tell a story of death and negligence, without making it gory or sensationalist. In this way, Noble presents a new way to process grief. With compassion and care, Raviv searches out people who have lost someone, fulfilled their dying wish to be cremated, only to learn later that many people didn’t end up exactly where, or how, they thought. It’s deception beyond the grave. Noble offers a new way to think about death after death.

Reported / Hosted by: Shaun Raviv
Produced and Distributed by: Wavland and Campside Media
8 Episodes

6 - Empire City

Chenjerai Kumanyika has an iconic audio voice. He commands a room and captivates an audience. Empire City draws on his background as an academic and then marries it with his keen storytelling abilities and deep passion to share his ideas; which are complex and not standard. Archival research, walking tours, and thoughtful interviews are woven together with incredibly immersive sound design to create an epic history of the New York Police Department. This series is narration-heavy, but after +6 hours of Kumanyika, you won’t feel let down. He presents his thesis: Is the tagline of the NYPD—To Serve and Protect—accurate? And then he digs into how we arrived at that concept, what his personal connection is to it, and with his daughter at his side we look to the future.

Written / Hosted by Chenjerai Kumanyika
Produced and Distributed by Wondery and Crooked
8 Episodes

5 - Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative

Jess Shane has a problem. She makes audio documentaries…but she’s not sure that the way they are made passes her ethical smell test. She worries that they are extractive and the idea that they can change the world is flawed. So she sets up an experiment to examine how, or rather if, she can make a documentary in a way that both she and the subject can feel good about. First, she has to first break all the rules of documentary: she pay subjects, she shows allows them to help construct the casting, and she shares the rough cut with them. Can this work? Or is it designed to fail in interesting ways? Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative is provocative, challenging and innovative. It will be talked about for years.

Produced/Hosted by: Jess Shane
Produced and Distributed by: Radiotopia
5 Episodes

4 - Ripple

This is a show for those who think they recall the largest oil spill in North America - the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the Gulf Coast of Alabama - but forget the horrid details. If it appears that you missed some of the facts, that was on purpose, potentially on behalf of both industry and government. This story fuses good old door-knocking journalism to create a climate-action thriller.

Reported/Hosted by Dan Leone
Produced and Distributed: Western Sound and APM Studios
8 Episodes

3 - Girl v. Horse

Nicole Teeny discovered as an adult that she has an invisible disability which makes running not only difficult but also dangerous. More than anything, she loves to run. Despite her diagnosis, she held on to her dream: to beat a horse in a race. And not a short race, an ultra marathon, where she would be the only human running, amid a pack of mares and stallions with their riders. The plan took years. There were many setbacks, but Teeny persevered. She met horses. She found a coach. She discovered a race that could work for her unique circumstances. Girl v. Horse story tells of how she pulled off her audacious quest. The tape is immersive. The story connects, inspires, and offers not only hope but grounded advice for folks with disabilities (of all kinds) who aren’t ready to give up their dreams. The fact that I was running, while listening to a story about an ultramarathon—against a horse—was meta. The outcome, superb.

Produced and Hosted by: Nicole Teeny
Produced and Distributed: 30 for 30 Podcasts
4 Episodes

2 - Lowlines

Feeling a sense of inner deadness, series creator Petra Barran set out on an adventure to make herself feel alive again. She left home with a base model Tascam and zero audio experience. Lowlines drops you right into the middle of a place to create an audio scrapbook: a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, a cross-country train trip, a secret desert bar in Arizona, through Mexico, and then finally down to the Peruvian Amazon for an ayahuasca ceremony. Barran has an incredible ability to narrate with a beat. The series builds towards a sense of person and place. Gorgeous production support and sound design from Lucia Scazzochio and Lina Prestwood, what emerged was the story of a journey. A bildungsroman addition to the podcast universe. It’s a story that drops you right in the middle of it and makes you feel—and almost smell—your surroundings.

Created / Hosted: Petra Barran
Produced, Edited Sound Designed: Social Broadcasts with Scenery Studios
7 Episodes

1 - Cement City

On the way between here and there this holiday, think about those highway signs you pass that announce the names of towns you’ve never been to. In Cement City, co-creators Erin Anderson and Jeanne-Marie Laskas decided to go to that dying town, to find out what keeps towns like Donora alive. Three years, one house, and a delicate, beautiful series later, you will learn the heart of this place. Listen to hear Laskas fall in love with this town, discover an oddly timely political parable, and feel the magic that this series manages to create. You will be captivated by the beauty of a town that has a not-ironic Smog Museum. It’s a unicorn of a series, and it’s waiting for you, on all fours, when it’s time for your me-time listening.

Hosted and Co-Written: Jeanne Marie Laskas
Produced, Edited, Co-Written: Erin Anderson . Story Editing Michael Benoist
Distributed by Audacy Originals
10 Episodes

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Here’s a Spotify playlist with everything included:

(EXCEPT HOME OF THE BRAVE WHICH YOU CAN FIND HERE)