Bingey List 2025

My Top 10 Best Narrative Series Of This Year

Dec 10, 2025

And there goes another year! This one teetered from an eerie silence, to the return of optimism. Did I fall in love this year quite the same way I have in the past? Maybe not…but in the last six months an incredible, in fact a surprising, number of spectacular narrative series have appeared. Amid the continued shrinking of this industry, I notice more co-productions being formed, new alliances created. Innovation and cooperation are now the vanguard of this industry. Places like Pitch Party Podcast are making marked efforts to improve visibility of this industry. Festivals like Tribeca and Resonate are increasing the shelf-space and visibility for indie creators….while also opening doors to the commercial (read: paid) part of the industry. And aside from providing a much-needed space for community, both are helping to grow this industry.

There are so many new and exciting upstarts, startups and cool new things happening that it’s almost hard to keep track. Aside from the bevvy of impressive newsletters that focus on this industry, we’ve got new and expanded forms of written content about the industry: Sound Fields, an expanded Good Tape…there’s even an Essential Listening Poll. There are even audio magazines now…welcome Signal Hill and Written in Air.

We’ve got new and growing collaborative efforts forming in Europe and beyond (XMTR, The Ecco), and an incredible number of venues for producers to shake things up and try something new. From Audio Flux, to Small Audio Art, to Sound Walk September, I keep tripping over new ways to expand my creative wings. To me this signals a new way forward for producers in this industry to sharpen their tools, remove some layers of corporate hubris and make audio for the love of it again. No one is going to get rich on 3-5 minutes of audio…but they are reshaping the industry, one minute at a time.

Here’s the list…

10 - Where Is Daniel Morcombe?

It’s unusual for me to agree to commit multiple hours to the heinous crimes of pedophiles and child abductions. Finding these criminals and bringing them to justice is incredibly important work; but the content upsets me, and the plot twists lurk into my daily thoughts and raise my anxiety. However, once you once you meet the the Morcombes, Salt-of-the-Earth Aussies and parents of Daniel, you’ll want to keep hanging out with them…even though the content is sometimes difficult to hear. Once you get invested in this story, you’ll want to stick with them to learn about how they helped to bring about systemic change, on a wide scale. You’ll also feel their inner strength and tenacity for life through their words, which is massively inspiring, against the backdrop of a very dismal subject. Now, each year in Australia, the entire country celebrates Red Shirt Day, where people wear red to teach kids and also Recognise, React, and Report to unsafe situations for children. This kind of collective action was borne out of intense pain and trauma. Their hard-won efforts deserve your time.

The Binge Cases, Season 17
Matt Angel, Host, Producer
8 Episodes, 6 hours
LINK

9 - Left To Their Own Devices

I’m not sure this was meant to go into the Thriller genre, but that’s the effect it will have on parents. We all know that we carry the equivalent of a supercomputer slash atomic bomb in our back pocket…but the extent to what the dangers and concerns they have on our children remain largely speculative fiction for us—especially since we either bury our heads in work (and our own phones), or lose sight of our children behind a closed door. Ava Smithing, host and reporter of the series, wrote this series to explain how her 12-years-old self was both radicalized and abused by the plentiful ‘skinny-gram’ content of Instagram. She wants to use this series to raise awareness about how she sees tech companies as entirely complicit to both her eating disorder, and something the DSM-5 has yet to officially diagnose: Addiction to Technology.

Toronto Star, with Paradigm Media Group
Ava Smithing, Host, Reporter
10 Episodes, 5.3 hours
LINK

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8 - The History Podcast: Half-Life

When Joe Dunthorne found his Great-Grandfather’s massive tome of memoir, a brilliant chemical engineer, he thought he would discover the story of how his German-Jewish ancestors escaped Nazi Germany. Instead, on page 1692, he discovered a gutting revelation. Half-Life explains how one family history becomes a common history. The series opens with a unforgettable description of watching his grandmother “use radioactive toothpaste” that her husband made. From there it moves down the family tree in a delightfully self-deprecating and at times brutally honest portrayal of one family history, warts and Nazis and all. When his memoir finally nails down some truths, in the last 80 pages, this story gets more strange and bizarre before it goes straight again—if it ever does. Wander through an old chemical weapons factory. Watch at the skeletons fall out of this Jewish family closet. Travel back to Turkey. It’s at once both a public memorial that uncovers a very private reckoning.

BBC’s The History Podcast: Half Life, with Falling Tree Productions
Eleanor McDowall, Producer : Joe Dunthorne, Host
8 Episodes, 3.8hours
LINK

7 - Blood Relatives

A grisly crime is committed which at first seemed to be rather open-and-shut case…and also one of Britain’s most infamous crimes. Wealthy parents adopt children; children go off the rails; mental health struggles; question of succession; whole family ends up dead. Except one person…the son Jeremy Bamber, whom at first was portrayed the way the town saw him: as a nair-do-well bonvivant, gentleman farmer, who is quickly indicted for this crime. But then Heidi Blake, journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker, starts to dig into the files. What she finds is the most egregious case of police ineptitude—it’s truly mind-boggling. Crime scene evidence was needlessly tampered with…convenient details emerge to support a theory…extended family members that ‘discover’ a piece of evidence from the murder, which the police seem to take as detective work. Did In The Dark do it again? Did they solve a cold case of a man who has already spent decades behind bars? It might have had a chance for another Curtis Flowers moment…until a shocking thing happens which changes Bamber’s possibilities for appeals, forever. This page-turner of a series will lead you through the case with boggling detail.

The New Yorker: In The Dark
Heidi Blake, Reporter Host
6 Episodes, 4.7hours
LINK

This series is something of a miracle. Slate’s long-running queer podcast Outward, founded by Christina Cauterucci, opened their feed to a 10-part documentary series, When We All Get To Heaven, about one of the first gay-positive churches in North America. The series is co-produced with Eureka Street Productions, and hosted by Lynne Gerber, an independent scholar, who discovered an trove of 1,200 cassette tapes that archived an entire decade of a sermons, meetings, interviews and song at the Metro Community Church of San Francisco. This series so concisely tells the story of a lost decade, with its grainy tape residue, that it feels like you’re back in the room. It’s full of music, sorrow, loss, reckoning, even a scandal. And then, more importantly, how they moved past this difficult decade—and it’s vivid. The AIDS epidemic ripped out the heart of this community; here’s the raw account of how they all got through it, or pushed past it. The archive brings out an incredibly rich archive of raw, evocative, honest tape, full of singing, music, barefaced honest sermons…this is church like you’ve never heard it before.

Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ podcast
Lynne Gerber, Host, Producer
10 Episodes, 8.5 hours
LINK

5 - Wisecrack

Soaking wet and cold, Jodi Tovay randomly sat down in a pub just as stand up comedian Edd Hedges began his set at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She hadn’t planned on being there, but it was the closest, driest room. The show began a cold open: a creepy, terrifying, desperate banging, like on a door….and then the introduction…welcome Edd Hedges to the stage! He’s here to tell the story of the most terrifying night of his life. Tovay sat in the audience, wrapped. Was that real, she wondered? Was it funny, she pondered? So she went back the next day to see the show again…and then she hits record on a Voice Memo…which is where this story really kicks off. Wisecrack defies genre definition as it code switches between stand-up comedy, true crime, hardboiled detective work and a good old fashioned journalist quest. It tests the boundaries of what storytelling can, or rather, should do, because it calls out comedy as tragedy, and then dissects the story to make sure that we fully understand why we laugh of the things that make us uncomfortable.

iHeart and Tenderfoot.tv
Jodi Tovay, Producer, Host
6 Episodes, 3.5 hours
LINK

4 - The Retrievals S2: The C-Sections

In this delicious mashup of the medical drama trope with the investigative reporter archetype, Susan Burton creates a series that unfurls through a captivating narrative, next-level writing and prodigious delivery in a tight 4-episode structure. Once I got beyond the poor title choice I fell for the central character, and the fact that the entire series is willing to focus on an issue that has few entry doors—Women’s Pain. On another level, this series is equally about consent, which is the unpleasant bedfellow of pain. Burton uses her intrepid reporter skills to uncover Susanna Stanford, the unicorn hiding in plain clothes—and she becomes the medical equivalent of Erin Brockovitch, which is another feminist literary trope I’m happy to see put to work. Stanford was a patient, and a lay person, who went from circulating a small survey to a Mom Net group, to published author of several academic articles. By the end, we witness Stanford changing the medical establishment and operating room systems, on a grand scale. All because this incredible woman had the tenacity and bravery to stay focused on the issue, which was her issue, of women’s pain during cesarean section delivery.

Serial Productions/NYTimes
Susan Burton, Reporter, Host
4 Episodes, 3.2 hours
LINK

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3 - Sea of Lies

How did Albert Walker become one of the most wanted men in the world? The story begins in a small town in Ontario called Orangeville, which has nothing to do with the fruit. Sea of Lies tells the story of an unlikely discovery: a dead body shows up in the fishing catch ten miles off shore, near Devon, England. His does have one identifiable feature: A Rolex watch, which plays a significant role in solving this crime. Host and producer Sam Mullins adroitly writes and narrates Sea of Lies with a rollicking humour, an eye for timing and delivery that make it all come together like a multicoloured polkadot outfit. It’s crime with a side of twisted humour, and just enough suspense to keep you coming back. From door-knocking in England, to the fish-packing plants of Devon, to wandering into small town Ontario, this series helps uncover an almost-perfect murder in perhaps the most unusual way. It’s a series about a grisly crime, told through more loopty-loops than a roller coaster at an amusement park.

CBC: Uncover
Sam Mullins, Writer, Host
Alex Gatenby, Producer, Reporter
7 Episodes, 7.2 hours
LINK

2 - Deep Water

Imagine finding yourself on assignment at a breathwork retreat, and then stumbling into an extreme sport that you didn’t know you were passionate about. This is what happened to travel writer Lydia Gard, who literally got hooked on Free Diving—that’s when people put on long fins, wetsuits and dive into the ocean for minutes at a time—even past 100 meters of depth—without oxygen or any breathing aids. Coaches train people to relax and be calm…it puts meditating on a whole new level. It’s a niche sport that didn’t attract much attention beyond a small crowd of enthusiasts. That is, until a new group of buff, chissled-chinned men clad in wetsuits began to show up to competitions—and importantly—started to publish videos of their dazzling results on Instagram. Their willingness to brush aside danger is catchy; their physical feats are otherworldly. Is this Free Diving’s contribution to the Manosphere? These same influencer-types now publish videos that go viral of lung punctures and underwater blackouts. Gard is annoyed that her once quiet sport was now being pushed to massive extremes….but she also had questions. Were they doping? Is the regulatory body looking at this issue? It’s both a chronicle of an extreme sport and how the Internet can change the trajectory of sport. But also a cautionary tale that there’s no amount of technology, or equipment or drugs that can take away the power of the ocean; 100 meters is still 100 meters, 11 bars of pressure, and a long way from air.

Tortoise Investigates and The Observer
Lydia Gard, Reporter, Host
6 Episodes, 3 hours
LINK

1 - Fela Kuti: Fear No Man

This is a sonic tour de force about the life and music of the Afrobeat pioneer, and Nigerian musical legend, Fela Kuti. This series took over three years, and a massive team, to make. It was created by Jad Abumrad, and in a way this show is a completion fusion of his three previous titles: Radiolab (for expansive content), More Perfect (bullseye political commentary) and Dolly Parton’s America (brilliant music coverage). It’s a podcast that will make you want to dance, sing, shout and then pump your fist in the air. For Nigerians, Fela Kuti is about as popular as Michael Jackson, as political as John Lennon and as talented as Prince…but yet most people in North America have never heard of him. Feast your ears on this series, open your mind to what music is capable of and get ready to create a playlist, because seven hours of Fela Kuti’s life story told through his music is not enough. If you’ve ever felt like one song could change the world, this series will really spell that out for you in detail. Music is a powerful joining of so many forces…and Fela Kuti was a master of them all. What a treat to find an Audible series that can be found on other platforms.

Audible with Higher Ground and Western Sound
Jad Abumrad, Producer, Host
10 Episodes, 7+ hours
LINK

This year I’ve decided to single out some more notable series. It’s not easy to compare apples and oranges…so I’ve got some delicious sweet grapes for you here!

Get ready for More Best Bingey Essentials
Here are the categories:

Best Overall Output

Best New Indie Series

Best Industry Builders

Best Ongoing Series

Best Public Media Series

Best Mini-Series

and also…

The Cringey List

Stay tuned for these announcements, coming soon!

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