From crime deep dives to investigations to chat shows with our favorite celebrities, here’s our top podcast picks for the year
Podcasts have come a long way since launching over 20 years ago. What started as a way to make audio stories accessible on-demand has turned into an artform in its own right, offering longform investigations, immersive fictional stories, and off-the-cuff chats that can make you feel like you’re in the room with your favorite celebrities. Like with so much of media, 2025 brought a reckoning for podcasts: the market for narrative series contracted, while much of the medium moved into video format, upending how many podcasters approached the form.
That’s not to say there isn’t great stuff still coming out — and this list proves it. From explorations of the internet, to biographical deep dives, to good old-fashioned interview shows, here’s our 10 favorite podcasts that launched this year, in the order they came out.
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Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky
Monica Lewinsky has been through the ringer. After an affair with Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, the general public — including many prominent feminists of the time — scapegoated her for the president’s bad decisions, maligning her as a sex-crazed vixen who pushed him into a relationship. For years she struggled to rebuild her reputation, and in the mid-2010s, relaunched herself as an anti-bullying advocate. Now, with her podcast, she’s giving others with complicated backstories — from acquitted murder suspect Amanda Knox, to former child star Molly Ringwald, to outspoken comedian Sarah Silverman — the room to tell their stories fully.
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Spotlight: Snitch City
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team might be best known for helping to take down pedophiles in the Catholic Church, but that’s by no means the only kind of investigation they do. In this six-part series, crime reporter Dugan Arnett goes deep into police corruption in New Bedford, a small fishing town in southeastern Massachusetts embroiled in the war on drugs. It’s a wild ride of fake informants and bad cops, kingpins and bag men, all trying to survive.
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Good Hang with Amy Poehler
It’s no surprise that Saturday Night Live alum Amy Poehler gets her guests to open up — she’s been a mainstay in comedy for more than three decades, acting in blockbuster movies and long-running sitcoms, capturing our hearts with a girl-next-door bubbliness cut with a sharp wit. Good Hang takes advantage of that, both because she’s able to bring in her friends — some of the biggest names in showbiz, like Maya Rudolph and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — and the video format allowing us to see the smirks and winks that give extra depth to the conversations. It’s like being at a dinner table with some of the brightest, and funniest, minds of our times.
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Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer
Former daytime TV host Jerry Springer is one of the most complicated public figures of the late 20th century: An elected Democratic mayor who lost his office over a sex scandal, only to remake himself as the host of one of the most notorious television shows of the 1990s, only to again remake himself as a thoughtful and insightful public speaker. Leon Neyfakh (co-creator of the massive Slate series Slow Burn) takes the listener on a four-and-a-half hour journey into Springer’s life and times, talking to those who knew him, worked with him, and battled him. As an Audible Original, this isn’t available on the regular podcast feeds, but nonetheless is an excellent example of the way that longform audio can immerse a reader in a story.
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Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet
OK, so this isn’t exactly a new show — Breaking the Internet is the fourth season of Garret M. Graff’s incredible longform series Long Shadow, which explored how we ended up in this precarious moment in history — but it’s still one of the most impressive podcasts to hit the airwaves this year. His previous seasons have tackled 9/11, the rise of the far right, and America’s peculiar history with guns; this one turns the lens on the internet, tracking how a tool that was supposed to democratize the world ended up fracturing it, possibly beyond repair.
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Nashville Now
Longtime Nashville journalist (and Rolling Stone editor) Joseph Hudak is the host of this weekly interview show that brings Nashville’s biggest names into the studio for candid conversations. Want to know what Gretchen Wilson’s been up to for the 20 years since her hit “Redneck Woman” came out, or how Shooter Jennings found father Waylon Jennings’ lost tapes? Hudak puts his subjects at ease while offering his expertise into the subject, giving us some of the most revealing conversations in country music.
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The Outfit
From the moment the public found out about it, America has been obsessed with the Mafia. But there’s so much more to it than The Godfather and the stories we’ve been told. Journalists Alana Hope Levinson (former editor of Mel and current features editor of Wired) and Dan O’Sullivan (author of the Substack crime newsletter Sullyville) dive into the lesser known players of organized crime, like Ken Eto, the Japanese American member of the Chicago outfit, or the Kray twins, who terrorized London in the 1960s. They also branch out into how the mafia has affected culture, like its involvement in building the Twin Towers and reality TV. (And don’t worry — yes, there’s an episode about Goodfellas.)
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The Devil You Know
Sarah Marshall’s longtime show You’re Wrong About has become a staple in the podcast world for bringing in brilliant guests for thoughtful and surprising explorations of topics from the cola wars to Christmas. But for this eight-part series, she goes it largely alone to dig into the origins of the satanic panic — a period from the 1970s to 1990s, where members of the media and the public whipped themselves into a frenzy over the possibility that Satanic cults were kidnapping and murdering children across the country. Though many have tackled the subject, Marshall’s sober analysis and interviews with some of the key victims of the panic make this a must-listen.
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Allison After NXIVM
Many of us know the story of NXIVM, Keith Raniere’s upstate New York self-help group which devolved into a sex cult and resulted in Raniere being sentenced to 120 years in prison for sex trafficking, conspiracy, and racketeering. We also might know about Allison Mack, the former child star and Smallville actress who was one of Raniere’s key deputies. She also served time (three years for racketeering) and since her release in 2023, has largely been silent. But in 2024, she decided it was time to finally tell her story. Journalists Vanessa Grigoriadis and Natalie Robehmed were up for the job, and after sitting with Mack for hours of interviews across multiple days, put together this painful, and often gruesome, look at how an otherwise normal individual finds herself at the helm of a cult.
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Chameleon
Josh Dean first launched Chameleon way back in 2022 with a series called The Hollywood Con Queen, a multipart investigation into a mysterious person who convinced movie-industry gig workers to travel halfway around the world, only to find themselves stranded in strange lands, for no apparent reason. Now, he’s brought it back as an episodic weekly show, giving the full story of a particular con in just 45 minutes. These bite-sized crime stories — like Anne Hathaway’s con-artist fiancé, or a fake version of the Zombies that toured America — offer the same kinds of confounding mysteries as his longform efforts, without the commitment.
