The 50 Best Podcasts of 2021
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2021” coverage here.
Updated at 6:35 p.m. ET on December 30, 2021
We take podcast ranking seriously. Our process starts with a search. We seek shows anywhere we can find them—sometimes hearing about them directly from producers, other times from a friend of a friend’s mother’s uncle, or sometimes through our own secret methods of rooting out gems. Then we dig in. (Of course, with more than a million podcasts in existence, our extensive listening still makes only a tiny dent.) To track our impressions, we make a spreadsheet with legends, drop-down menus, color codes, formulas, and notes on the thousands of podcasts that we’ve discovered over the past decade. From there, each and every slot is labored over and debated.
This is our seventh list commemorating the year’s best podcasts, and deciding what makes the cut has only gotten harder each time. Ours is, as far as we know, the longest-running of the robust roundups, and we’ve been reviewing the medium longer than virtually any other critic in the space. The requisites for inclusion on our list have evolved over time, and now we only consider new shows or shows that have a new focus. We’ve decided to eliminate anything that sounds like it’s always sounded, too. True-crime shows and in-depth looks at government snafus remain available in droves, but we sought series that transcended their genre conventions. As always, we’ve also recused ourselves from selecting The Atlantic’s podcasts.
This year, makers played with structure in fresh ways, flirting with form and cadence. As the pandemic wore on and limited field reporting, archival tape became central to narratives. Memoirs also shone, allowing homebound producers to shout into the void. In other series, our houses themselves—and the attendant challenges around gentrification and homelessness—were the story. Some shows were hornier than ever before; others sharply connected sex to gendered power dynamics. Others drew parallels between the pandemic and the AIDS crisis or the aftermath of 9/11. Producers zeroed in on terrorism—both domestic and abroad—searching for patterns and reaching for hindsight.
The 50 shows on this list outdid their competitors in both ambition and success. They pushed the form, helped us metabolize the world around us (or escape from it), and embodied the spirit of 2021. (And a special shoutout to Dan Taberski, the first host to ever earn two of our top-five spots.)
50. Toxic: The Britney Spears Story
Knowing that Toxic: The Britney Spears Story has a happy ending isn’t a spoiler. Instead, awareness of Spears’s recent triumph gives a hopeful sheen to the work by the two women who popularized the #FreeBritney movement. Comedians Tess Barker and Babs Gray’s first podcast, Britney’s Gram, analyzed the pop star’s Instagram feed. But when Spears stopped posting, they started researching and showing up to her hearings. Tips explaining her silence came in and checked out: She’d been forced into a mental-health facility. The women eventually gained a massive following. Fueled by their Britney fandom and by Barker’s research chops, Toxic takes a look at Spears’s first and second marriages, her infamous 2007 public persona, and the absurdity of the media’s reaction to her shaved head. But Toxic isn’t just about Spears. It’s also a call to arms for people with disabilities; a story about power, sexism, and isolation; and a reflection on who has the right to make bad decisions.
Gateway Episode: “Toxic”
49. Dish City
The new season of Dish City is a comprehensive study of the ballooning pandemic food-delivery marketplace. Once made up almost exclusively of pizza and General Tso’s chicken ordered over a landline, the landscape is now technologically sophisticated and morally complex. The show covers both the pleasure of eating and the exploitation of gig workers by big tech companies. Early episodes trace the origins of American Chinese food and Big Pizza, featuring anecdotes about portable pizza warmers and the jump in the popularity of Chinese restaurants after President Richard Nixon visited the country in the 1970s. Later, the hosts, Ruth Tam and Patrick Fort, pull listeners into the 21st century by documenting the rise of DoorDash—and the toll its business model exacts on many restaurateurs and delivery workers. Dish City pores over the logistics of food delivery, debates the meaning of takeout, sends its hosts out to work as drivers, and asks why the billionaire founder of DoorDash started the business; Tam and Fort are desperate to find a real solution to a broken system.
Gateway Episode: “Why Is Delivery a Thing?”
48. Strangeland
is a true-crime show that involves some familiar threads: evidence gathering, suspect lineup, investigation critique. But hosts Sharon Choi and Ben Adair avoid the predictable, turning the show into a thoughtful meditation on race, culture, and immigration. In 2003, in Los Angeles’sisa brilliant example of how true crime can contain surprising depth.
