December 17, 2025

Readers,

Casey Wilson, the comedian and Bitch Sesh host, is currently on vacation, and in her absence she’s set up a multi-cam livestream in her Southern California home, inviting fans to help spot any rats mucking about. The feed doesn’t offer a comprehensive view of the place — just three rooms: the kitchen, the living room, and a disquieting, top-down shot straight into the toilet bowl — but what is visible suggests a tasteful abode. (I do love a kitchen with an island.) Still, the whole thing has an unmistakable Paranormal Activity energy, and while I understand the impulse, I suspect I’d rather remain blissfully ignorant of whatever might transpire in my own home while I’m away. Then again, I do have cats, and my co-dependent ass would absolutely want to keep an eye on them.

Anyway, do hit me on my profesh Instagram for all my Vulturious activities. Please and thank you. And as always, feel free to write to tell me what your neighbor is up to: nicholas.quah@vulture.com.

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IN CONCLUSION

Photo-Illustration: Vulture

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 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, the 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. 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.

10. 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.

9. 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. 

8. 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.

7. Uncover (CBC)

If the first Trump presidency birthed Crooked Media as the normie center-left’s podcast empire, the second has given rise to MeidasTouch — an evolution in pace, form, and packaging, even if it’s still hosted by three somewhat interchangeable white guys. In a reflection of where digital media sits today, MeidasTouch is as close as you get to a fully YouTube-optimized organism of the Democratic Party faithful, pumping out videos with headlines like “GOP Leaders LOOK FOR EXIT as Trump DESTROYS PARTY” and “Trump NEXT MOVES Exposed by his OWN Pardon SCHEMES…,” wrapped in a visual aesthetic that borrows just enough from MSNBC to legitimize something that otherwise looks filmed in a bunker. The idea that “the left needs its own Joe Rogan” or “its own Charlie Kirk” was already tired from the second it was fired off someone’s keyboard for the first time, but in this case, it somewhat applies. Really, what we’re looking at here is the mainstream left’s analog to Steve Bannon’s War Room.

6. Shell Game, season two (Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts)

It’s so clear he’s running for President. It’s equally clear that, these days, the communications arm of the election campaign requires more than working the fading institutional press. 2028 hopefuls also have to run the gauntlet of the ever-expanding constellation of new-media authorities: the podcasters, Twitch streamers, Substackers, short-form video hustlers, the Theo Vons and Hasan Pikerses and Joe Roganses and Kara Swisherses and Alex Cooperses of the world. And in some ways, perhaps more crucially, one might have to become one of these authorities themselves. Of course, this isn’t entirely unprecedented as a phenomenon. Right-wing talk radio hosts have been jumping into politics since roughly the dawn of mass media. But the contemporary shape of this dynamic is far more pungent, pervasive, and powerful than ever before. With This is Gavin Newsom, the California governor is obviously working to position himself as some sort of aisle-bridging but Trump-antagonizing candidate, an acquiescent project that involves booking Steve Bannon one week and Ezra Klein the next. Whether any of this will meaningfully drive discernible outcomes is the question, but for now, it’s worth grappling with this possibility that your next president might literally be a podcaster.

Read the Rest of the List Here

➼ Netflix has struck a deal with iHeartMedia to bring a slate of the company’s video podcasts onto the platform. Fifteen shows are included: The Breakfast Club, Bobby Bones Presents: The Bobbycast, My Favorite Murder, Dear Chelsea (as in, Chelsea Handler), Joe and Jada (Fat Joe and Jadakiss do culture news), This is Important, The Psychology of Your 20s, Behind the Bastards, three HowStuffWorks shows, New Rory & MAL, 3 and Out with John Middlekauff, and Buried Bones. The shows will begin rolling out in early 2026, with new episodes and a limited library of back catalog available. Noteworthy is the fact that the video versions will be exclusive to Netflix, while the audio editions will still be widely accessible. 

A lot to track here, but if I were to boil the biggest takeaway into one headline: Charlamagne tha God and The Breakfast Club are coming to the biggest streaming service in the world.

 ➼ Netflix has also struck a deal with Barstool Sports to bring three of its shows to the platform: Pardon My Take, The Ryen Russillo Show, and Spittin Chiclets. The arrangement looks to be the same as iHeartMedia, in that new episodes and select old ones will be available on Netflix when those shows debut in early 2026. Video exclusivity applies too. My biggest takeaway from this? Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo reunited … in a way. 

➼ Really strange stuff happening at the confluence of AI and podcasting of late. A notable recent example: The Washington Post is ramming through an AI-generated “personalized” podcast product that allows users to assemble customizable news feeds, algorithmically curated and delivered by a synthetic voice. The problem? The system has repeatedly proven unreliable, in some instances even changing key aspects of a story. At a moment when trust in the Post is already strained, the risk is that this experiment further erodes what credibility remains. Another example is well-captured in this Los Angeles Times headline: “Podcast industry under siege as AI bots flood airways with thousands of programs.” 

➼ I wrote up the two stories for site, which you can find here.

➼ The BBC has found a successor to Melvyn Bragg to take over In Our Time: the broadcaster and author Misha Glenny. Bragg had anchored the iconic ideas, history, and philosophy show for 27 years before retiring.

➼ In case you missed it last week, the Golden Globes announced its nominees last week, including for the inaugural Best Podcast category. We went over the snubs and surprises here.