This year brought seismic changes to the podscape—splashy, big-money acquisitions by companies like Spotify, uneven, big-money débuts by players like Luminary—and, above ground, a healthy crop of reliably good, bountiful content. New daily-news shows arose beside the stalwarts; impeachment podcasts sprang up. History podcasts brought perspective, music podcasts brought joy, and one of my favorite podcast genres—the locally produced NPR-style narrative investigative series—continued to flourish.

2019 in Review New Yorker writers reflect

on the year’s best.

Earlier years’ successes brought rewards, too. Earlonne Woods, of the great inside-San Quentin State Prison podcast “Ear Hustle,” transitioned to civilian life while continuing to co-produce the show. Reporting done by Madeleine Baran and her peers at “In the Dark,” in 2018, helped the case of its subject, Curtis Flowers, reach the Supreme Court in June—and then, on December 16th, it helped Flowers get released on bail, after twenty-three years in prison. This month, the Pulitzer Prize board announced the addition of an audio-reporting category, to begin next year; a wise colleague of mine suggested that it go, retroactively, to “In the Dark.” To that, I say, “Hear, hear.” Meanwhile, here are my favorites from 2019.

The podcast I’ve felt the most grateful for in the past couple of years—besides “Heavyweight,” which always moves me and makes me laugh like nothing else can—is “Trump, Inc.,” from WNYC and ProPublica, in which Andrea Bernstein, Ilya Marritz, and other serious-minded investigative reporters delve into Trumpian business and financial dealings, methodically turning over rock after rock and revealing worms galore. As I noted in a recent column about impeachment podcasts, “Trump, Inc.,” is among the most useful podcasts to provide clarity and perspective on all things Parnas, Fruman, and “perfect,” especially in its episodes “Ukraine,” in which Marritz travels to Kyiv, and “The Diplomat, the Machers, and the Oligarch.” There’s something oddly reassuring about the good-natured level-headedness with which Bernstein and Marritz guide us through the swamp and into, say, the Doral resort, where Donald Trump, Jr., is cheerfully riffing with a crowd chanting about a Hunter Biden conspiracy theory.

In the plucky and revealing “Richest Hill,” from Montana Public Radio, the reporter-host Nora Saks alchemizes a Superfund hot spot into audio gold. It can’t have been easy. Butte, a former copper boom town, has experienced tragic amounts of contamination and is home to a massive toxic lake, the Berkeley Pit; as the series begins, we learn that Saks and other residents fall asleep at night to the sound of the Phoenix Wailer, a car-alarm-like whoop-whoop that scares birds away from the pit, and which would scare me straight out of town. As the episodes unfold, Saks weaves in history (sounds of a long-dormant hoisting engine), music (“Solidarity Forever,” fiddling), and colorful characters into this story of environmental horrors and federal bureaucracy, and in doing so brings a community vividly to life for listeners who may not know anything about it, or about the role that the advent of telephones played in the creation of a toxic-water site. The series sets out to trace the progress of a Superfund cleanup deal in real time; recently—spoiler alert—some progress has been made.

In the second season of the USA Today series “The City,” its creator and host, Robin Amer, works with the Reno Gazette-Journal’s Anjeanette Damon to present a story about a gentrification battle centered on the strip clubs of Reno, Nevada. Reno, thanks to companies like Tesla and Google, is undergoing a tech boom, which has driven a real-estate frenzy that local officials want to embrace, in hope of phasing out the era when Reno was known for strip clubs and quickie divorces. But, as the podcast suggests, such ventures often end up hurting the poor and the vulnerable. Amer and Damon narrate the tale of a changing American community through vivid characters and audio: unnerving 911 calls from Elon Musk’s Tesla Gigafactory, rancorous city-council meetings, private-eye stakeouts, activism within a residential hotel, and salty straight talk from the strip-club kingpin Kamy Keshmiri.

The enduring legacy of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” the brilliant work of musical theatre that John Cameron Mitchell co-created with Stephen Trask, might have distracted some of us from focussing on how much we’ve needed Mitchell to address, in musical form, the world we’re living in now. Fortunately, this year brought us “Anthem: Homunculus,” Mitchell’s musical podcast, from Topic and Luminary, with songs by Bryan Weller, which riffs on smartphones, “palliative democracy,” and crowdsourced medical care, and which regularly produces gems like “In the future, everyone will be anonymous for fifteen minutes.” It ventures discursively, “Hedwig” style, through hilarious stories and moving fables, some of which Mitchell draws from his own life and transmutes, miraculously, into a weird and wonderful alloy. The framing conceit—a telethon coming to us from the Center Point Trailer Court, in Kansas, where Hedwig once lived—makes for surprisingly listenable audio drama, and doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies as so many audio dramas do; it’s essentially cabaret, for which Mitchell’s wit, humanity, and warmth are a perfect fit.

“Reply All,” Alex Goldman and P. J. Vogt’s long-running Gimlet podcast about the Internet, is reliably excellent at explicating our interconnected world, and punctuated by the hosts’ razzing rapport and Vogt’s charmingly horselike laugh. (Recurring segments like “Yes Yes No” and “Super Tech Support,” which are at once breezy and brainy, help, too.) But the show has also built up such reserves of listener trust and reportorial skill that it can branch out into less Internet-focussed narratives, including, this month, a three-part series by the producer Emmanuel Dzotsi (of “Serial” Season 3), about a fateful leadership battle in the Alabama Democratic Party, captured at a moment that changes everything. The parallels with broader Democratic Party conflicts give the story an unnerving resonance.

The powerful “1619” podcast, part of the 1619 Project, from the New York Times, begins on the coast of Point Comfort, in Hampton, Virginia, where, four hundred years ago, in a ship called the White Lion, enslaved African people arrived for the first time in what became the United States. There, and throughout, the project’s creator and the series’ host, Nikole Hannah-Jones, brings us up close to the sounds and images of American history, sparking empathetic recognition through audio, including archival recordings. The show explores subjects including the economics of slavery, democratic representation, health-care history, black land ownership, and pop music in textured, sometimes surprising ways. (You might not expect Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It” to make an appearance in the series, but it does, when Wesley Morris makes a convincing and exuberant case for the influence of black American music on white American yacht rock.)

“Tunnel 29,” from BBC Radio 4’s “Intrigue” series, tells the story of Joachim Rudolph, who, in 1961 and 1962, as a young engineering student, dug a tunnel between West and East Berlin and helped twenty-nine people escape communist East Germany. The smartly structured, elegantly written series, narrated and produced by Helena Merriman, makes use of several strengths, among them evocative sound design (breathing, scraping, German-language announcements and songs), uncommonly naturalistic audio acting (by Mark Edel Hunt, who reads English translations of Rudolph’s interviews), and extraordinary footage from the tunnel escape itself—from, incredibly, NBC News. (A mind-blowing story in its own right, especially if you’ve been reading or listening to “Catch and Kill.”) “Tunnel 29” provides intrigue aplenty, combining the fun of a thriller that we know will end happily with grim perspective on history and tyranny. Merriman’s evocation of the night the Berlin Wall went up is particularly stunning—houses divided in half, families on opposite sides.

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I was amazed by this careful and painstakingly researched series, from the CBC and the producer-host Justin Ling, which tells a story of inconceivable horror—serial murders of gay men in Toronto between 2010 and 2017—without sensationalism and with great compassion. Early on, we visit the garden of a woman named Karen Fraser, who lives on a quiet side street in Toronto; she points out her flower beds, the “tulips and daffodils along here, lots of periwinkle,” which, Ling says, were “designed and maintained by her faithful gardener, Bruce.” That gardener, Bruce McArthur, had killed eight men, six of them immigrants of color; their remains were found in and around Fraser’s yard, the site of the largest forensic investigation in Toronto police history. As Ling tells the story of the men’s disappearances, the community’s reaction, the police’s slow recognition of the truth, and a parallel series of murders in the seventies, he grounds us in small, human moments we can understand. The series isn’t so-called true crime; it’s a community story, focussed on healing and truth.

After a couple of partly brilliant, partly cringe-inducing seasons (the empathetic but stalkerish “Missing Richard Simmons”; the ambitious and unnervingly confessional “Surviving Y2K”), the producer Dan Taberski, creator-host of the series “Headlong,” knocked it out of the park with “Running from ‘Cops,’ ” which ventures deep into the world of TV’s longest-running reality show and reveals startling truths about policing, perceptions, TV, and American justice. Via frivolous drug arrests, setups, constant talk of “bad guys,” and even its inescapable theme song (“Bad Boys”), “Cops” has shaped its viewers’ perceptions of police work—and, in some ways, influenced police work itself. In the first episode, we hear audio of young kids playing “Cops”: “Get down on the ground, now! ” one yells. “So why were you running tonight?” With his longtime producer, Henry Molofsky, Taberski takes a topic that many of us might find deadeningly depressing and turns it into a key to decoding recent American history and culture.

Few of us were expecting Jad Abumrad, the sound-innovating creator of “Radiolab” and its spinoff “More Perfect,” to make a serialized podcast about Dolly Parton, but once in a while life can pleasantly surprise you, and there you are in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The series, co-created and co-produced by Shima Oliaee, which seeks to answer the question of why, in this divided time, Parton is the one thing everyone can agree on, does, in the end, tell a broadly American story, drawing connections between Parton’s music and biography to the American labor-rights movement (via “9 to 5”), the African and Caribbean history of the banjo (via Rhiannon Giddens), the British murder-ballad tradition, and beyond. Abumrad also grew up in Tennessee, where Parton’s song “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” he tells us, “hung over my childhood like a mist”; an episode in which he traces connections between his father’s childhood in a high-mountain village in Lebanon and Dolly’s childhood in the Great Smoky Mountains—and then has a kind of reverie while visiting Dolly’s childhood home—is one of the series’ loveliest. Throughout, Parton’s music and mellifluous speaking voice make for the best, most joyful listening experience of the year.