The 2025 podcast season is wrapping up, and listeners have plenty to choose from, including the return of popular podcasts that fans have been anticipating. There are a couple of true crime immersions, a twist on the typical talk show and a show featuring deep dives from a BookTok celebrity.
‘Heavyweight’ (Pushkin Industries)
After a brief hiatus, host Jonathan Goldstein and his team return with “Heavyweight”, a show “devoted to a form of podcasting that’s drifted precariously out of the spotlight,” said Vulture. The award-winning narrative podcast features episodes in which Goldstein helps people confront and resolve lifelong regrets and lingering questions, playing the role of a “kind of time-traveling therapy unit.” After being cancelled in 2023, the latest batch of episodes proves the show remains a “patient, empathetic exploration of ordinary lives, crafted with emotional precision and Goldstein’s sublimely droll sensibility.” (Pushkin Industries, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)
‘The Adam Friedland Show’ (Independent)
This interview show is “at once a parody of talk shows and an earnest attempt to reinvent them,” Vulture said. Comedian Adam Friedland puts an ironic and “occasionally sincere” spin on the genre. The irony is part gimmick and also a “tool that disarms both guest and listener in the service of producing moments with genuine, unscripted feeling.”
The show has featured a slew of fascinating guests, including David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland High School shooting turned gun-control activist and Representative Ritchie Torres, “one of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders of Israel,” said Vulture. The podcast feels like “archetypally new media.” It is “neither pure comedy nor conventional journalism” but a “hybrid form that thrives in the fractured media environment by making friction and unpredictability itself the point.” (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube)
‘In The Dark: Blood Relatives’ (The New Yorker)
For the sixth season of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast “In The Dark,” New Yorker journalist Heidi Blake investigates the 1985 Whitehouse Farm murders in England, one of the most infamous mass murders in recent British history. The series expands on her article from last year, “exploring various angles that seem to have been overlooked,” said Podcast Review. Finding the case details questionable, Blake discovers new evidence that casts doubt on Jeremy Bamber’s conviction. (The New Yorker, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)
‘Camp Swamp Road’ (The Wall Street Journal)
This new true crime podcast focuses on the murder of a man, killed in a shootout on the country road of the same name on September 9, 2023, in rural South Carolina. Police claimed it was a clear case of self-defense under the state’s Stand Your Ground law, but when “secret recordings tell a different story, the case begins to unravel,” said Podcast Review.
Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein leads the investigation into the shooting, which “could have gone unnoticed if the victim’s sister had not committed to uncovering the truth.” Based on “hours of secretly recorded phone calls, hundreds of pages of police records and months of reporting,” the series exposes how the “initial investigation may have been shaped by police misconduct and overlooked evidence,” said the Journal. (The Wall Street Journal, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)
‘Inklings Book Club’ (Independent)
Jack Edwards’ book club podcast stands out among the genre. Booktok connoisseurs may be familiar with Edwards’s “chipper, honest and nuanced reviews of contemporary and classic literature,” said Podcast Review. Inklings “goes beyond a traditional book club format”, offering its audience “weekly author interviews and a spotlight monthly book club chat,” where Edwards asks authors about “their writing process, inspiration and future projects.” (Spotify, Apple Podcasts)
True crime, a book club and a therapeutic outlet led this fall’s best podcasts
