Short podcasts for a road trip
August 14, 2017 12:31 PM   Subscribe

I want to listen to podcasts that have a definite beginning and ending. Suggestions?

At the beginning of my summer program, a classmate and I drove from Ohio to Vermont and listened to the entirety of S-Town on the way. It was great! It was almost exactly the right length for the trip and made the 9 or so hours fly by. And we completed the whole thing, so we weren't left hanging when we arrived to campus.

Now, the summer program is ending, and we are going to be driving back to Ohio at the end of this week, and I realized . . . I don't have any podcasts for us to listen to! I mean, I have the podcasts I normally listen to, but they are all in the middle of a season, or aren't the type of things that come to a satisfactory conclusion anyway.

Does anyone have any recommendations of podcast series that are similar to S-Town? Fiction or non-fiction is good - what I liked was the fact that we could finish the entire series in one go. I have already listened to both seasons of Serial.
posted by chainsofreedom to Media & Arts (8 answers total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: In The Dark - A true crime podcast about the investigation into the abduction of Jacob Wetterling in rural Minnesota in the early 80's. My wife and I binged it on our last super-long road trip.
posted by Captain_Science at 12:50 PM on August 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Here are some similar format podcasts I like, although I can't vouch for the exact total length:

Offshore, Season 1, A Killing in Waikiki
Stranglers
In the Dark
Untold

I don't know if all the serial podcasts are about murders, or if it's just all the ones I listen to. But I have more if that's not enough.
posted by ernielundquist at 12:53 PM on August 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Tumanbay: BBC fiction, Game of Thrones in a podcast.
Hidden Histories: Short series on early female novelists.
Mogul: Gimlet podcast about a hip hop mogul who committed suicide.
Missing and Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams?: CBC true crime
posted by carolr at 1:05 PM on August 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


I don't really like listening to serialized podcast/radio very much, but I enjoyed the hell out of "Missing Richard Simmons."
posted by Dr. Wu at 2:21 PM on August 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


In the style of Serial, I give you Accused which is about an unsolved Ohio murder albeit one on the other side of the state from you.
posted by mmascolino at 2:41 PM on August 14, 2017


The first three episodes of Two-Up are three acts of a musical called Thirty Six Questions, featuring Jonathan Groff and Jessie Shelton. It's kind an experiment in storytelling, with some elements of old style radio drama storytelling, but I found it cute and charming. Not sure what the rest of Two-Up's run will be.
posted by Phire at 2:51 PM on August 14, 2017


I wanted to second Season 1 of Offshore - it's not a slickly made as Serial, etc, but I think it gives a really interesting portrait of race and culture in Hawaii through the lens of two murders, and more than a lot of these I have heard, it actually felt relevant outside of itself.

Season 2, which is about the Mauna Kea observatory, should have been good (conflict between the scientists and the locals over a scientifically important and also sacred spot) but the presentation was overheated and I abandoned it halfway through.
posted by vunder at 4:38 PM on August 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


We did Homecoming on a road trip. It is fiction, a psychological thriller with Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac, David Cross, David Schwimmer... (I guess there is a season 2 but haven't tried it yet).
posted by starman at 4:55 AM on August 15, 2017


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