Each month, Podcast Review’s staff offers recommendations on the best new podcasts to listen to. Here are our favorites for April:
In Stiffed, a new documentary podcast from iHeartPodcasts and Crooked Media, host Jennifer Romolini tells the unexpected story of Viva, an erotic magazine for women that was published for an exciting few years in the 1970s. It was intended as a progressive magazine to sexually empower women, and was even staffed by feminist writers and editors. But Viva’s founder, Bob Guccione (also the founder of the men’s magazine Penthouse), got in the way of his own vision, and the women who wrote Viva took matters into their own hands.
The latest from USG Audio and the Invisible Institute finds Yohance Lacour at once investigating the 1997 beating of Lenard Clark by white teenagers as well as retracing his own history. The first episode opens with Barack Obama’s election night, which Lacour watched from a Chicago county jail. Lacour jumps between the personal and the public seamlessly, as he retells his own response to the hate crime that left Clark in a coma. The narrative style is rich, traversing through 25 years of Chicago history.
It’s rare to find a unique concept for a podcast these days, but Table Read is trying something different. From the mind of award-winning producer Jack Levy, the show promises novelty by taking feature film scripts off the page and recording them as dramatic audio performances. Each script is brought to life through high-quality scoring and actors you may have actually heard of. The production is meticulous. And though you couldn’t call the show “easy listening,” it will appeal to cinephiles, entertainment industry types, and those who still consider “metafiction” to be the highest form of art. As well, another innovation of Table Read is that everyone involved has equity in its production. Just as we’re hearing news of layoffs and squashed unions, it’s nice to encounter a podcast that’s putting its talent first.
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