M. Gessen never cared much for their cousin, Allen. They considered him nothing more than a pompous blowhard with an unsavory proclivity for shady schemes. Nevertheless, Gessen was still shocked when Allen was arrested for plotting to have his wife Priscilla killed.
In The Idiot, the latest podcast from the Serial team, Gessen dives into this all-too-personal drama, talking to both Allen and Priscilla at length, in an attempt to figure out how such a thing could have happened to their family.
When it comes to the central crime, The Idiot sounds pretty pedestrian. Man attempts to hire hitman to kill wife. “Hitman” is revealed to be undercover cop. Plan foiled. And unusually, at least compared to most examples of this particular genre, the justice system seems to work as it should in the ensuing weeks and months. In one sense, that it demonstrates an apparently functional justice system is really the most unusual thing about The Idiot.
Which is not to say that this is a boring tale — a continent-hopping love gone sour, with a cartoonishly overbearing mother-in-law in the mix, offers us plenty of interest. And it’s not to diminish the trauma that living through such frightening events must have caused Priscilla and her two young children. It’s just that, in comparison to the vast landscape of horrors there are to be found in podcasts these days, it’s not exactly the sort of thing that would have listeners theorising and speculating for weeks, like many of the previous Serial productions.
But that isn’t what Gessen is going for here. This is a small, personal story. The modesty of The Idiot’s central crime is complemented by the low episode count (five, totalling under four hours listening time), as well as Gessen’s unemotional, almost rushed narration. Nothing here is played up for drama; if anything, it’s a little brusque. It’s very far indeed from traditional true crime territory.
Although this is ostensibly a show about Allen and Priscilla, the main character of The Idiot is inarguably Gessen. Throughout, Gessen comments so often about how they don’t like Allen that it verges on “Okay, we get it!” territory. But what is interesting is how openly and honestly they ruminate on how this personal animus has affected their journalistic objectivity; during Allen’s trial, Gessen was shocked to find themselves rooting for the prosecutor.
When the narrator of a podcast inserts themselves too much into a narrative that isn’t primarily theirs, the results can range from distracting to downright annoying. In The Idiot, it’s kind of the whole point. Much more than the crime itself, The Idiot is about Gessen’s reaction to it, and in turn, the way all of our personal prejudices colour how we view even the most serious events. Gessen being an acclaimed journalist makes this discrepancy between our better angels and pettiest inner demons all the more notable – if even they, with several decades’ experience in the highest echelons of journalism, sometimes struggle to fight off those petty instincts, then what chances do the rest of us have?
So, in an effort to self-correct as much as anything else, via many hours of phone calls to him in prison, Gessen tries to find a humanising aspect to their much-hated cousin. Something to dimensionalize him beyond that Trumpian bombast. While clearly nothing would excuse him doing what he did, they succeed to an extent. Again however, this is not really a podcast about Allen, but about Gessen’s attempts to overcome their personal biases and excavate the story behind the story.
Because The Idiot is so modest in approach, it would be easy to overlook. But to do that would be to miss a psychologically probing show made with clockwork precision, all the way down to a final line that will have you thinking again about everything you’ve just heard.
