Adnan Syed, who was convicted for the murder of Hae Min Lee. Which then brought me, and the world, to Dirty John, a six-part podcast of which the final episode was released earlier this month. Here the focus is on domestic violence. The series, co-produced by the Los Angeles Times and audio company Wondery, examines the terror inflicted on Californian woman Debra Newell and her family by a serial stalker and con-man, John Meehan. All three podcasts are brilliant examples of the genre. You quickly lose yourself in them, and the temptation is to binge-listen. Yet I have to report that in all three cases, for different but related reasons, I grew uneasy as the episodes piled up. My qualms weren't about quality, so much as values. Intriguing as all three podcasts are, there is something unedifying about them. Dirty John is a dreadful story in which Newell and her daughters, Jacquelyn and Terra, are subjected to months of intimidation by Meehan, a psychopath who is aptly described by Newell's lawyer, John Dzialo, as the scariest man he's ever met, with eyes "black as coal".

Tyler Goodson of the podcast S-Town stands at the grave of his friend John B McLemore, Credit:Jay Reeves We don't blame victims of domestic violence, and nor should we. But we can comment on them honestly. As Dirty John unwinds, it becomes increasingly and annoyingly clear that Newell and her daughters are incredibly foolish. Even as copious evidence of Meehan's lurid past piles up, Newell, a successful business operator, keeps on letting him back in her life, sometimes offering the bizarre excuse that she is protecting her family from what he might do if she cut him loose. (I thought they had police and the courts for that.) Nobody is more frustrated at her behaviour than her lawyers. Jacquelyn, meanwhile, engages in vicious, profane text exchanges with the man she believes has stolen her mother from her – to what perceived end, we cannot begin to imagine. And Terra, the baby of the family, studies The Walking Dead to learn how she might better cope with Meehan. I was captivated. But why, exactly, did I need to know all this?

S-Town, meanwhile, turns out to be a euphemism for "shit town", which is what McLemore calls Woodstock, which he can neither stand nor leave. He's obsessed with the vintage clocks he repairs, with the elaborate mazes he creates on his property, and with climate change, on which he delivers extended diatribes. A closeted gay man, he is also obsessed with a young red-neck called Jake Goodson, whom he employs for odd jobs on his substantial property. As S-Town delves deeper into the disfiguring acts McLemore asks Goodson to perform upon his body, on the promise of a future inheritance, the series becomes, frankly, intrusive and voyeuristic. McLemore's suicide, in June, 2015, should perhaps have stopped S-Town in its tracks, but instead it is incorporated into the story. The problem with Serial is more straightforward. It pretends to be dispassionately investigating whether Lee's ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was guilty of the crime for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Yet the show has a clear investment in any evidence it unearths that may exculpate him – what a story that would make! Unfortunately, the longer Serial goes on, the clearer it becomes, to me at least, that Syed, a devout Muslim and honours student by day, who pilfers from the mosque and hangs with dope dealers by night, got what he deserved. The police declined to take part in Serial, as did Lee's family. I can appreciate the irritation of the former, and the renewed pain of the latter, at host Sarah Koenig's unfettered gushing delight whenever she stumbles upon a detail that props up Syed's lies.

Loading There are common threads here. All three podcasts are brilliantly researched and produced. And all three, I think, offer us up the lurid trials and tribulations of their uneducated, petty-criminal or lower-class subjects so that we, with our more orderly middle-class lives, may gawk at them as if they were grotesques. Imre Salusinszky is a Fairfax Media columnist and was media director for former premier Mike Baird.