Podcast Canon: Heavyweight and the art of crafting an audio narrative
With Podcast Canon, Benjamin Cannon analyzes the history of podcasts and interrogates how we talk about the art form.
In life, we rarely get second chances. One can imagine, then, the incredible kismet involved for a beloved-yet-canceled podcast—one particularly predicated on providing people another attempt at absolution—to be given a second shot of its own. Such is the story of Heavyweight, the masterwork of lifelong narrative audio storyteller Jonathan Goldstein (known also for his time on This American Life and the cult hit Canadian show WireTap), whose reprieve comes nearly a year and a half after its rather ignominious end in December 2023.
Debuting in 2016 as part of Gimlet Media’s vaunted stable of shows, Heavyweight is a finely wrought work of podcasting. The kind of show that can make you laugh, cry, cringe, and consider life more deeply, all within the span of a single episode. Across 58 entries, Goldstein and his loyal coterie of producers perform the work of emotional archeologists, sifting methodically through the wreckage of lives past, piecing together disparate fragments in an attempt to divine their original form.
Guests come to the show with a life event of intense significance—the “moment it all went wrong,” as Goldstein puts it early in an early episode—and, through the help of the show’s production, they’re gifted with a sense of closure or additional perspective on its circumstances. Goldstein and his team interview a great many people involved with the central story to try to paint as full a picture as possible. Eventually, they engineer some sort of meeting with the parties involved, gently forcing the hand of fate to bring about some novel form of catharsis. It makes for thrilling listening, to be able to eavesdrop on such emotionally potent conversations and discover the different effects time has on our memories of events.
The podcast’s investigations run the full gamut of human emotions as well. Some are joyful, like a group of pre-teen boys who, one summer in the 1970s, biked hundreds of miles across state lines by themselves. Some are painful, as with a beloved uncle’s death from AIDS and the unacknowledged burden it placed on his then-boyfriend turned death doula. Some are comical, where Goldstein doggedly tracks down the one person who looked directly into the camera during the filming of the monumental single-take movie Russian Ark. Some defy easy categorization, like when a lighthearted episode about a broken arm that might not have happened swerves unexpectedly into richly emotional territory.
The quality that makes Heavyweight a natural choice for the Podcast Canon is that it’s an inherently risky program. It is particularly noteworthy because it’s the kind of risk largely absent from the medium these days, especially as the video chat show continues to rise in popularity. The stories that have come to define Heavyweight are those entirely without quick answers or easy resolutions. In a few episodes, we learn that years have elapsed since the team began their reporting of a particular story. At any stage of its production, a piece may fall apart. Subjects can back out, or worse, they may not find any answers or closure in revisiting old wounds. What comes out of such labor-intensive production, however, is a program that is all the richer for the effort. One can hear the time, attention, and care that is put into the research, writing, and recording. The show is distinctly audio-first, and one that proves the notion that investing in podcast production as an artistic medium will always be more spiritually rewarding than that of mere content creation.
Of that effort, one can imagine the countless hours spent by Goldstein and his team of producers chasing down leads and cajoling them into becoming participants in this curious enterprise. Longtime audio fans will perhaps know that his skills at the cold call are legendary, having honed them over a decade spent working as a telemarketer, documented on This American Life episode 205, “Plan B.” But it goes far beyond the team’s abilities at just making contact. Perhaps their most transcendent skill is in gaining trust.
Human behavior—an old professor was fond of saying—is 99% about hiding. We have become adept at the obfuscation of our emotional truths for the benefit of society and those close to us, but especially for our own mental well-being. We mask in most quotidian interactions, whether out of fear or a desire to remain unnoticed. Goldstein and his team not only ask interview subjects to be unguarded, but to relive some of the most consequential moments of their, or someone else’s, life. It’s a wonder that anyone talks at all, let alone on mic for the world to hear.
If there’s one aspect of the production I feel deserves the most praise, it is that of the show’s story editing, that is to say, the method by which each episode’s narrative arc is crafted. For all of the great tape that Goldstein and his producers capture, its success or failure comes down to the way it all gets put together. Whether a cogent story can be told—one that follows the familiar Aristotelian beats and delivers on its central premise in an artistically satisfying manner—is a matter of writing, shaping, listening, editing, and rewriting as often as needed until arriving at the intended product.
And here, Goldstein’s background is incredibly important. Having cut his teeth at This American Life, a program of incredible focus, verve, and longevity in the narrative audio documentary world, Goldstein learned firsthand the Ira Glass story editing playbook. TAL, which will be celebrating its 30th anniversary this November, is essentially the audio world equivalent of Saturday Night Live, a seismic shift in the culture of radio, as important for its production as it is for its influence. Its creative tendrils snake through seemingly every corner of the medium, largely as its past contributors and staff have moved on to other productions. Heavyweight alone benefited from past producers Wendy Dorr (a producer on WireTap as well), Alex Blumberg, Peter Clowney, Paul Tough, BA Parker, and Emily Condon providing production input, support, editing guidance, and so forth.
Goldstein has long been a canny writer for the ear, didactic yet inviting at the same time. His narration is the driving force of each episode’s story—save for a handful reported by producers Kalila Holt or Stevie Lane, where Goldstein’s tone is still ever-present. That tone is largely reliant on a delicate balance of raw emotionality, a deep sense of humanity, and some bone-dry humor. This voice and sensibility have been on full display dating back to his earliest full-length piece on This American Life, a bit of narrative reporting from one of Chicago’s last Russian bathhouses. Perhaps as a result of the steam messing with the recording equipment, it takes the form of a reported monologue delivered entirely post facto, yet listeners find themselves hanging on his every wonderfully vivid description throughout.
The Heavyweight voice and structure are in place from the start, but successive seasons find the production team able to access a higher register of emotional resonance in the resolution of their investigations. This feels emblematic of the team becoming more assured in their roles, taking the time to luxuriate in the telling and developing a unique bond that lends itself to a greater sense of openness. Additionally, as the show began to take off, the level of its stories’ complexity increased almost exponentially.
Season one was a mostly inward-looking affair, with Goldstein mining the stories of close friends and family members to provide the impetus for his investigations. Patching up the tempestuous relationship between his elderly father and uncle, a chance to reexamine why his first real romance faltered, honoring a friend’s father’s dying wish in daring fashion. By the later seasons, its status as a destination podcast on a hot network meant increased numbers of story submissions and thus a greater degree of daring to the stories it could tackle.
What works most, especially in the later seasons of Heavyweight, is this constant pessimistic voice in the back of your mind, saying, “there’s no way they’ll get to the bottom of this” over and over again, until, in a moment of pure elation, Goldstein and company finally crack the case. It’s just such a damn joy every time, and much of that is the production’s inversion of a magician’s pledge-turn-prestige routine. We’re instead shown something that we think is going to be impossible, the show’s narrative serves to heighten and reinforce that impossibility, and then finally it is made possible, and the dopamine comes flooding in. I think about this with episodes like “#16 Rob” and “#27 Scott.” Somehow, by one of the show’s last episodes, “#56 44 Photos,” it feels as if it has veered fully back into the realm of the magic trick again, and the result is astonishing.
Goldstein has also long toyed with the notion of whether or not audio is a form of objective reality: A microphone becomes a mechanism through which to capture the world without being party to its vicissitudes. From his earliest days on the radio, he has played with the existence of Jonathan Goldstein the person and “Jonathan Goldstein” the character. He’s a lovable nebbish, both self-deprecating and aggrandizing in seemingly equal measure. It’s a style of presentation that made WireTap such an indelible creation, with its seemingly verité recordings capturing instead the exaggerated Goldstein, deliberately leaving listeners questioning which is the authentic version. The humor as deployed in Heavyweight works as a ballast, keeping listeners on an even keel, preventing them from dipping too far into the deeply emotional elements of the narrative.
His persona makes for an unlikely hero, charging forward into the fray not from a place of cocksureness, but instead of melancholic resignation. These investigations are by nature quixotic; no one in their right mind appears to care as much about their resolution as Goldstein, and the people he speaks to on the phone often have a way of making that subtext into text. The way that he and the show’s creative team are able to wring as much pathos and narrative heft out of each investigation’s shoe-leather progression is admirable.
An artifact of the show that I find rather striking on this relisten is a pervasive belief which runs throughout its early seasons: that of Gimlet Media’s assured place in the world of podcasting, and that it will seemingly remain so. Gimlet co-founder and CEO Alex Blumberg is often lampooned by Goldstein, made out to be dispassionate, money-obsessed, and single-minded in his business focus. It can feel positively Ozymandian from this vantage. Gimlet was, for a certain stripe of listener, the Platonic ideal of podcasting production—obsessively crafted confections bearing the sonic imprint of public radio, with a much more insouciant spirit. Its imprimatur was so strong that the phrase “a Gimlet podcast” held the same kind of connotations as, say, “an A24 film.” Yet, a few years after being sold to Spotify, the studio began to hit rough patches, beginning with layoffs mandated by the Swedish streaming giant. Now here, in 2025, as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse so succinctly puts it, “nothing beside remains.” All references to this fallen great make one feel strangely nostalgic.
Dovetailing with that fall, there is something especially ignominious about the way the show ended. Along its trajectory, the quality of the stories it was telling only deepened, reaching new heights with the two-part “Barbara Shutt/Barbara Wilson” series. The tale of a charismatic woman Goldstein’s mother-in-law met working abroad in Copenhagen one summer in the ’60s turns out to be one of the show’s most interesting investigations. But it arrived at a time when the show was being shunted off into the Spotify Exclusive tier, so the first episode of the two-parter, “#40 Barbara Shutt,” was their final regular feed episode. Its follow-up, “#41 Barbara Wilson,” and the remaining 17 episodes of the series lived exclusively on that service for years before coming back out of exclusivity in 2024 for all to enjoy at last.
If I’ve learned one thing from the series though, it’s important to end on a hopeful note. Listeners shouldn’t have too much longer to wait for new episodes of the show to be released. And while the layoffs and producer shuffling from the Gimlet days have scattered many of its production crew to the four winds, the show’s main creative braintrust of Goldstein, along with senior producer Kalila Holt and supervising producer Stevie Lane, have made the jump to its new home, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg’s Pushkin Industries, intact. And because we believe in giving flowers to the people who have helped make a podcast what it was along the way, shout-outs to Jorge Just, Kaitlin Roberts, Peter Bresnan, Mohini Madgavkar, Bobby Lord, Damiano Marchetti, and Chris Neary.