Gabriel Urbina is Costa Rican-American writer and director. He is best known as the creator of the cult classic podcast Wolf 359 and the Audible Original romantic comedy Hit Singles. His latest show, The Harbingers, is in its first season now.
Something I haven’t heard before. Every time I try a new podcast, that’s what I’m always trying to find. A story told in a new way. A conversation that goes to a new place. A surprise in a familiar place, or an unexpected bit of familiarity in something new and strange. Here are ten shows that have broadened my audio horizons over the years. Check them out and you’ll find your own audio universes expanded in ways big and small.
Fawx and Stallion
There’s many a fiction podcast exploring the intricate lives of brilliant detectives, but for my money none come close to the exploits of Hampton Fawx and James Stallion. When Holmes and Watson are away, their neighbors try to horn in on the spotlight, taking on cases that are as mysteriously suspenseful as they are pulse-poundingly hilarious. Come for the laughs, stay for the best relationships in fiction podcasting.
Crowley Time with Me, Tom Crowley
Comedian Tom Crowley’s one-man odyssey against the boring and the ordinary, this endlessly innovative sketch show might be the most inventive audio comedy offering on the Internet right now. Each new episode distorts, satirizes, reflects, and refracts both the timely and timeless, creating a vision of our world and our culture that is both larger than life and intimately familiar.
The Amelia Project
Whoever said that death was no laughing matter? The Amelia Project does one thing: it helps its clients fake their death to escape tricky situations. They do it well, and following along with their adventures and their many – many – cases is a droll, witty journey into the bleakly funny side of death… and inevitably, of the lives it serves as an exclamation mark for.
Two Thousand and Late
Fiction podcast’s reigning queen, Lauren Shippen, has blessed us with this newest creation: a furious, defiant howl – both fierce and fearful at once – at a world as it seems to burn all around us. Harper and Havoc – underachieving modern woman and ancient demon who has possessed her, respectively – are perhaps the definitive duo for the current state of audio fiction, and their adventures so far feel like only the first rise and fall of a merciless roller coaster.
Last Dance
Amidst dead gods in a ruined landscape, scavenger Jericho Raeke finds something strange, and powerful, and dangerous. So begins a saga of magic, conflict, and broken worlds, as breathlessly entertaining as it is mystically engrossing. Season one of this, fiction podcasting’s latest cult favorite, has only just recently wrapped up, so get in the ground floor and accumulate your hipster cred while it’s still in its early days!
Children of Tendu
The podcast when it comes to writing like a professional and conducting your professional business like you’re a creative writer. Javi and Jose have decades of experience between them, and it shows based on the endless supply of charming witticisms, fascinating anecdotes, and sturdy common sense advice that makes up every minute of this show. Doesn’t update often, but every time it does it’s a must-listen!
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
A work of cultural and artistic archeology like no other, Andrew Hickey’s madman journey through the history of music explains everything you could ever want to know about why our modern pop landscape is what it is. Don’t be fooled by the title – music brings into itself art, literature, politics, current events, science, technology, and a million other endless pursuits, and so all of them are broken apart and examined as well, all through Hickey’s truly inexhaustibly encyclopedic knowledge of the 20th Century and beyond.
Give Me Away
Mac Rogers and Company’s brilliant, funny, moving, even at times spooky exploration about what it means to be me and not you, or you and not me. Its story, of alien political prisoners finding a new home by sharing humans’ minds and bodies, is one of the most endlessly inventive tales in the world of audio fiction, and one of its most touching. Its daring, bold third season has just wrapped up, so there’s no time like the present to check it out!
36 Questions – The Podcast Musical
An intimate, aching look at why we love those we love. A heartfelt comedy about loss and identity. The best podcast musical ever made. It seems unfair that this show is all three of those things at once, but, hey I don’t make the rules, I just work here. It’s also perfection in podcast form. If you have not checked it out yet, run to it as fast as you can.
Life With LEO(h)
Octavia Bray’s daring science fiction romantic comedy, with its questions about artificial intelligence and human-machine relations, already felt prescient when it debuted in 2021. Its explorations and musings only feel more relevant and timely today, and they’re so much sweeter for being moored in lovable characters, fiendishly clever plotting, and hysterical hijinks.
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