Picks of the week
Bone, Marry, Bury
The world would be a better place if all true-crime podcasts opened with a karaoke version of Céline Dion. This spoof of the genre starts on a high and stays there as Allie (Sarah Hyland) and her entertainingly critical best friend Gabe (Harvey Guillén) go to a New Year’s Eve party. Allie’s just been dumped and fired, with not a lot left to lose, but as the night unfolds there’s a promise of sex and death with plenty of twists. Hannah Verdier
Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan
“There are a lot of people who don’t want me to tell you this story,” says journalist Habiba Nosheen as she introduces this podcast about Nuseiba Hasan , who’s been missing for 10 years. Nosheen’s investigation started three years ago after a tip-off from a source desperately searching for Hasan, her birth mother. She shares what she has learned since. HV
Calling Bullsh!t
“How in the hell did we get here?” Former advertising executive Ty Montague asks this about big-brand fake news and purpose-washing, exploring the gap between what companies say they stand for and the actions they’re actually taking. First up, Facebook, followed by Blackrock, Juul and Airbnb. Hollie Richardson
Love Thy Neighbor
Thirty years ago, riots broke out in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Crown Heights. Collier Meyerson looks at how those four days shaped New York, amassing interviews with people who lived there at the time to learn how the car accident that killed a young boy led to such anger and retribution. She believes it can help us to understand modern dilemmas, from police violence and racism to antisemitism. HV
Spectacle: Las Vegas
Host Brent Holmes exposes every side of Sin City with the help of some of Vegas’s best-known characters. First up is Penn Jillette, who started out as a hippy and thought he was too good for the Strip, until he and Teller were offered big money to transfer their magic act to Las Vegas. HV
Producer pick: Short Cuts
Chosen by Danielle Stephens
If BBC Radio 4 had decided to run this episode of Short Cuts for Valentine’s Day, the cynic in me wouldn’t have listened out of spite. A week later though, I was more than happy to hear what seemed to be a love letter to love – not simply falling in love, but falling out of it, and everything in between.
Josie Long’s voice is a perfect accompaniment to the topic at hand, and she never fails to seem invested in hearing more. The smooth montage of people sharing their experiences with crushes had me smiling, cringing and nodding along in agreement. Parts two and three work nicely to help change your mind on the power of love, and the ending seems like a sort of recorded therapy session that the listener is let in on. You do feel that you’re overhearing a special moment between exes, unscripted, and real.
Did it leave me feeling anything different about the concept of love? Maybe not, but it gave me insight to the thoughts of strangers – and that was the fun of it.
Talking points
The TV industry’s obsession with adapting podcasts doesn’t look like ending soon. In the coming weeks, we’ll get the AppleTV+ adaptation of WeCrashed (starring Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto) and the Disney+ version of The Dropout (starring Amanda Seyfried). Plus, romcom podcast Meet Cute has just been picked up by the producers of Dickinson, with Amazon set to adapt horror-pod, The Horror of Dolores Roach. Here’s the real question, though: how long until someone makes a pod adaptation that’s genuinely brilliant?
Why not try: Whenever It Kicks with Jessie Cave | Beneath the Blue Lights
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