7 serialized podcasts worth starting from episode 1

Most podcasts don't reward starting at the beginning. Daily news shows, interview shows, panel shows: pick any recent episode and you're fine. Serialized narrative podcasts are the opposite. Drop in halfway through and you've missed the setup, the payoff, and everything in between.

The trade-off is that a good serialized podcast is a real commitment. Seven to twelve hours of listening across a season, with a plot that keeps building. In return, you get storytelling that a stand-alone episode of anything can't match. These seven all pay it back.

TL;DR

• Serial (Season 1): the show that mainstreamed serialized podcasting; still the reference
• S-Town: a small-Alabama mystery that becomes a character study
• Bear Brook: cold-case forensics done with real empathy
• The Missing Cryptoqueen: the OneCoin fraud, still unresolved
• Wind of Change: the CIA, the Scorpions, and a Cold War rumour
• The Trojan Horse Affair: investigative journalism about a media panic
• Slow Burn: anthology history; pick any season and start there

If you've already sorted your app oldest-first (see our chronological listening guide for how), you're set. If not, do that first, then work through this list.

Serial (Season 1)

Serial Productions and The New York Times · 2014 · 12 episodes

The reason the modern podcast industry has serialized shows at all. Sarah Koenig's reinvestigation of the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, and the conviction of Adnan Syed, is still the reference point for how to structure long-form investigative audio. It landed at the exact moment when smartphone-based listening was becoming mainstream, and it dragged the medium with it.

• Best for: anyone who's never done a serialized podcast and wants to see the peak of the form
• What Season 1 does well: patience. Koenig gives each thread its own space and lets you sit with the ambiguity rather than pushing you toward a verdict
• Where to start: Season 1, Episode 1, "The Alibi". Sort the show's feed oldest-first. Season 1 sits before Season 2 (Bergdahl) and Season 3 (a courthouse in Cleveland), which are also worth doing if the format hooks you
• Heads up: the case has continued to develop in real time. Bonus updates released years later contain spoilers for the season, so save those until you've finished

S-Town

Serial Productions · 2017 · 7 episodes

Host Brian Reed sets out to investigate a suspected small-town murder in Woodstock, Alabama, and ends up in something else entirely. To say much more would spoil it. What starts as an investigation turns into a portrait of one deeply eccentric, deeply lonely man, and by the end the podcast is questioning what right a journalist has to the story of someone else's life.

• Best for: anyone who wants a podcast that's more literature than journalism
• What it does well: atmosphere. Reed's sense of place is unusual for audio; you can feel the humidity
• Where to start: Episode 1, "Mirror in the Mirror". All seven episodes were released together in 2017, so no waiting between them
• Heads up: ethically complicated. Reed has released reflective follow-up episodes years later that explicitly wrestle with the questions the original raised; those belong after you've finished the main run

Bear Brook

New Hampshire Public Radio · Season 1: 2018 · 5 episodes

The kind of investigative work public radio does better than anyone. Season 1 unwinds a decades-old New Hampshire cold case: four unidentified bodies found in barrels in the woods. Producer Jason Moon uses new genetic-genealogy techniques to trace what the state couldn't, and the story ends up connecting to a wider pattern of missing persons across the country.

• Best for: listeners who like true crime but not sensationalism
• What Season 1 does well: empathy. Everyone involved gets treated as a person, not a plot device
• Where to start: Season 1, Episode 1. NHPR has since released other seasons and standalone Bear Brook Productions series in the same feed. Sort oldest-first and let Season 1 play through
• Heads up: the sound design is quiet and restrained. Fine on headphones; harder in a noisy car. Turning on Skip Silence in your player of choice helps

The Missing Cryptoqueen

BBC Sounds · Season 1: 2019 · 8 episodes

Jamie Bartlett's investigation into Ruja Ignatova, the founder of the OneCoin cryptocurrency, and the multi-billion-dollar pyramid scheme she built around it before disappearing in 2017. The BBC has kept returning to the story as the FBI hunt has continued and new details have emerged. Season 1 is the core investigation and gives you everything you need to follow later updates.

• Best for: listeners who want to understand how a fraud like this actually works from the inside
• What it does well: patient explanation. Bartlett takes the time to explain multi-level marketing, real cryptocurrencies, and the mechanics of the scam before pulling them together
• Where to start: Season 1, Episode 1, "The Missing Cryptoqueen". The follow-up episodes released since 2020 are worth doing once you've finished the main season
• Heads up: the case is still unresolved. If you want a neatly tied ending, this isn't it. If you want to understand a real ongoing fraud, it's rare

Wind of Change

Pineapple Street Studios · 2020 · 8 episodes

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose day job is writing for The New Yorker, spent years chasing a Cold War rumour that the CIA had secretly written the Scorpions' 1990 power ballad "Wind of Change" to help sink the Soviet Union. The result is a series that takes an absurd premise absolutely seriously, and uses it as a way into a broader look at CIA cultural operations and what "influence" actually means.

• Best for: anyone who liked Serial but wants a stranger, more historical subject
• What it does well: treats a wild question as a real one. Keefe doesn't wink at the audience or hedge; he goes and asks
• Where to start: Episode 1, "Meta Data". All eight episodes are released and stand alone as a complete series
• Heads up: the same feed now hosts newer Keefe series like London Falling. Those are separate stories; finish Wind of Change first if that's what you're here for

The Trojan Horse Affair

Serial Productions and The New York Times · 2022 · 8 episodes

A joint investigation between Hamza Syed and S-Town host Brian Reed into the anonymous 2013 letter that triggered a national crisis in English education and became the basis for years of policy changes. The pair spend the whole series trying to answer one question the government's own inquiries never really did: who wrote the letter and why?

• Best for: listeners who want a series about the mechanics of a story more than the story itself
• What it does well: shows the reporting. You watch Syed and Reed hit dead ends, get pushed around, argue with each other, and keep going
• Where to start: Episode 1. Sort oldest-first
• Heads up: the show has generated its own coverage and rebuttals since release. Listen to the podcast first before reading the response pieces

Slow Burn

Slate Podcasts · 2017 to present · anthology, one story per season

Different rules for this one: Slow Burn is an anthology. Each season is a self-contained deep dive into a specific historical moment. Season 1 covered Watergate. Later seasons have covered the Clinton impeachment, the LA murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, David Duke's rise to power, the run-up to Roe v. Wade, and more.

• Best for: listeners who want the depth of a serialized podcast without a twelve-episode commitment tied to one specific story
• What Slow Burn does well: archival tape. Every season is threaded with recordings from the time, which does the atmospheric work most narrative history writing can't
• Where to start: any season. The whole point of an anthology format is that you don't have to start at the beginning. Pick a subject that interests you and start with Episode 1 of that season
• Heads up: because seasons live in one feed, sort filters can be awkward. Just look for the season opener you want and hit play

How we picked

Every show on this list actually resolves into a story with a beginning, middle, and end (even Slow Burn's individual seasons do). Every one has been indexed on Podtastic long enough to have real listener signal behind it. None of them require you to be up to date with a currently-releasing season to get value from starting today.

If you finish one of these and want more in the same shape, the "listen next" recommendation in each show's page on Podtastic pulls from listener behaviour rather than from an editorial list. That surfaces the shows that people who liked the one you just finished actually kept listening to.

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