10 Narrative Podcasts We Loved This Year
This isn’t a traditional year-end podcast list. For the second time running, we’ve eschewed a conventional “best of” format in favor of an approach that better reflects how podcasting now operates within the broader culture: less as a stable canon of shows than as a series of moments, events, and developments — often emerging from existing programs — that reveal something about the medium’s current shape and influence. We published that list last week under the title “10 Moments that Defined Podcasting in 2025.”
That framework, however, naturally leaves out a significant part of what podcasting still is for many listeners. Most notably, that list is devoid of any audio-centric narrative storytelling that once formed the core of how I related to, and curated, the space. To be candid, I didn’t encounter many narrative shows I truly loved this year, let alone break through to greater prominence in any meaningful way. Had I assembled a single, straightforward best-of list, it would have blended narrative and talk shows, with some overlap from last week’s selections: Pablo Torre Finds Out, TrueAnon, and The Adam Friedland Show would have made the cut; This Is Gavin Newsom and The Charlie Kirk Show obviously would have not.
What follows, then, is something narrower and more specific: a short list of narrative podcast projects from 2025 that, in a year when the form felt less central to my listening life, nonetheless stood out as especially worthwhile.
What We Spend (Audacy)
I am, at heart, a voyeur. And I love spreadsheets! That’s probably why I felt so drawn to What We Spend, a show that takes the emotional hook of a personal-finance blog and blows it open into something far more intimate and revealing about how ordinary people actually exist in the world. Listen, I’m tired of financial advice dispensed by influencers, pseudo-celebrities, or already rich people! I’m much more curious about how people who aren’t freakishly online deal with the horrors of budgeting. Hence the refreshing nature of What We Spend, which constructs each episode out of a combination of spot interviews and audio diaries, usually around a person who’s just doing a job somewhere.
The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall (CBC)
Sarah Marshall has been circling this material for years. The Satanic Panic, and the reactionary impulses it stirred in middle- and upper-middle-class white America throughout the ’80s and ’90s, has long been one of the You’re Wrong About host’s central fascinations, and in many ways, it’s hard not to read the subject matter as a core text that’s shaped her entire critical approach: the way social uncertainty mutates into primal fear, then calcifies into a convenient bogeyman and ultimately becomes a tool for enforcing cultural control. The Devil You Know feels like Marshall assembling all those threads into a single, fully realized work.
The Retrievals, season two (Serial Productions)
For whatever reason, Susan Burton & Co.’s follow-up to their searing 2023 investigative series hasn’t lingered with me the way the original did. But whenever I return to it, I’m struck all over again by its ambition — specifically the choice to frame the narrative like a medical procedural. It’s a clever solution to a tricky challenge: As a response to season one’s focus on the systematic dismissal of women’s pain, this season sought to chart out a picture of institutional change, which is a process that’s inherently tough to tell through a story of individuals. Purpose and method came together in fascinating ways here.
Uncover (CBC)
This is one of those cases where I appreciate the overarching project more than any single installment. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation launched this investigative-series umbrella in 2018, and each year the feed delivers four to six miniseries that generally hover around the border of the salacious and the journalistic. The 2025 batch ran the gamut: a decades-old case of sexual predation (The Banned Teacher), a body pulled from the ocean (Sea of Lies), a killer profile (Calls From a Killer), the death of a mystery man (Dirtbag Climber), Allison Mack post-NXIVM (Allison After NXIVM). They’re all interesting enough, if not revelatory, but the consistency is the draw. I might not always love what I’m hearing, but I know something else will be coming soon. Just like the good ol’ days of cable.
Shell Game, season two (Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts)
Evan Ratliff is a total weirdo. The veteran journalist (and co-host of the now-departed Longform podcast) continues his journey into the heart of our glorious artificially intelligent future, here by taking seriously a premise being advocated by so many AI boosters: someday soon, one person, armed with enough AI tools, can build a billion-dollar company just by themselves. So he tries it, staffing his start-up with himself and five AI “employees,” documenting the journey along the way. It’s a characteristically dry, funny plunge down the rabbit hole that pokes at something essential about the hours we spend on this earth.
Scratch and Win (GBH)
There are actually few stories more central to the texture of contemporary American life than the story of gambling at the moment (where’s the Kalshi market for this list?), which makes this Ian Coss series feel kind of essential in terms of understanding how everything came to be. Coss traces the unlikely rise of America’s most successful state lottery, born from a moment in the 1970s when Massachusetts officials set out to curb organized crime by challenging its power in illegal gambling markets … partly by taking over the market themselves. What follows is a sharply drawn account for how a government experiment in law-and-order pragmatism evolved into a cultural and economic force.
On the Media: The Harvard Plan, season two (WNYC Studios and the Boston Globe)
So, how are American universities doing under the Trump regime? Not great, obviously, and Ilya Marritz, returning as host, shows you just how not great by using that one particularly famous university as a case study in how deeply academia has come under fire from the White House and how its internal culture has been roiled in its wake. Harvard makes for a splashy focal point, though it is germane to the larger power structures; one of the more prominent threads in Marritz’s reporting is the twinned, oppositional fates of its current president, Alan Garber, and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, cast here as a kind of turncoat. But as above, so below. The pressures Marritz outlines — canceled funding, culture-war skirmishes, censorship, disrupted research pipelines, and pervasive institutional anxiety — apply across the entire higher-ed landscape.
Snap Judgment: A Tiny Plot (Snap Studios)
It is a most radical idea: What if people pushed out of society could build a new community on their own terms? After the city of Oakland cleared a tent city at Union Point Park in 2021, a small group of its residents were moved into a cluster of tiny homes, a pilot effort meant to be managed as a “co-governed community.” A Tiny Plot, led by reporter Shaina Shealy with producer Anna Sussman, follows the messy, hopeful, often painful effort to make that vision real. Housing, and the lack thereof, shapes so much about the life of the modern city, and here, Shealy, Sussman & Co. move between intimate portraiture and structural critique to offer a rare look at unhoused people shaping their own future and at how difficult that can be.
Fela Kuti: Fear No Man (Higher Ground)
Jad Abumrad’s return to podcasting finds him in characteristically compelling form. The Radiolab creator reprises the approach he honed in Dolly Parton’s America, melding his distinct flavor of expansive sound design with a deep historical and musicological curiosity, and turns it toward Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician and activist who pioneered the genre known as Afrobeat. The resulting 12-parter is big, meaty, and a little hard to pin down in the way that all Abumrad’s works tend to be, but his animating question is fairly clear: What is the role of the artist in a world of political uncertainty?
Embedded: Alternate Realities (NPR)
By far the best thing I’ve heard this year. This three-part series follows producer Zach Mack as he makes a $10,000 bet with his conspiracy-minded father over whether the man’s apocalyptic predictions will actually come through. It’s a “put up or shut up” gambit, but beneath the wager is a son trying to see whether his father can be reached through a fog of belief that’s become all too familiar. What unfolds is both a sensitive look at how conspiracy thinking operates and a tender, devastating portrayal of a family coming apart. It nudges you to wonder if we can ever move forward together again.
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