Serial’s The Idiot explores a dark family rift

A new podcast series from Serial Productions is always a status product – and The Idiot is no exception. The New York Times’s podcast maker excels in several areas: uncovering a madly interesting hook (often an ordinary person who proves more complicated than they first seem), giving the presenting journalist their own voice and examining a story from almost every angle. Its approach is to build a compelling podcast while the host narrates their investigative process. They’re always trying to be unbiased, but we’re party to their deliberations, their misgivings, and the way they flipflop between opinions.

The Idiot gives us this, along with beautiful pacing and perfect sound: background piano and descending strings. The series follows a man called Allen and his relationship with his children, their mother and his own mother. A family piece, then, which the host – the New York Times writer M Gessen – makes clear from the off. Allen is a cousin of Gessen (who is trans/non-binary and uses they/them pronouns) and is, in their opinion, “a pompous ass”. His mother, Lena, is difficult too.

Allen, a Russian-American entrepreneur, has two children with a Zimbabwean businesswoman, Priscilla. It’s 2019, and Allen and Priscilla are living in Moscow, not getting on too well. When Priscilla has to go to Zimbabwe for work for four days, Allen kidnaps the older child and abducts him to the US. When Priscilla eventually tracks Allen down and takes him to court for access, he abducts the boy again. Then he does worse.

We’ve got the trappings of true crime here: a hidden story, a dramatic FBI arrest, a court case that Gessen attends and 35 hours of prison phone calls between them and Allen (a bit like the calls to Adnan Syed, who was incarcerated for murder in the first season of the Serial podcast in 2014). Gessen is dedicated, talking to Allen even on the morning after their own wedding, and during their honeymoon.

But, to be blunt, Allen himself isn’t interesting enough for this amount of work. He’s not a charismatic conman, not a serial killer, not a wrongly imprisoned innocent man. He’s a blowhard with appalling control issues – and we all know several of those guys.

That’s not to diminish his terrible behaviour (though Allen himself certainly tries), but longtime Serial listeners will expect something darker, cleverer, more complicated. A twist. We think we’ll get one, but no. The Idiot gives us an interesting but not exactly gripping family story, elevated by a clever, committed journalist whose work is impressive right up to the very last line of the show. If only Allen justified the effort.

Have you been gripped by the Artemis II voyage to the moon? A beacon of hope in a time of trauma; ripe, of course, for on-air analysis. And the BBC’s World Service’s space-focused strand, 13 Minutes Presents, is ready and primed, using its connections to bring us the astronaut Tim Peake and space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock as hosts, alongside the US space journalist Kristin Fisher. Aderin-Pocock is lovely: bubbly, enthusiastic, inclusive. Peake is, well, an astronaut.

If only each episode was 13 minutes long, then this series might have worked. Instead, time-filling is the name of the game, which, if we’re being kind, must be part of space exploration. (The moon is a long way away – inter-astronaut small talk is surely required.) However, chats about in-flight toilets are far from riveting, and neither is hearing about how bad the road traffic is around the launch site. “People are really talking about it!” insists Fisher. Clearly not everything about the space voyage is exciting.

What this series reminds me of is those post-Olympic TV shows in which Clare Balding asks a sportsperson to talk us through how well things went in the last event. All the preparation paid off, did it? So much better than you could ever have dreamed? Most scientists, like most athletes, are dull in front of the microphone. With Artemis II, the granular detail is too technical for the experts to discuss, so we’re left with the atmosphere. And we all know there isn’t much of that up there.

History’s Greatest Fails sees How to Fail’s Elizabeth Day join forces with Dan Jones (This Is History) to bring us yet another history podcast. This one is judged through failure – a nice conceit, especially if we recall ye olde epigram: history is written by the victors. First up, Richard III, who Day and Jones are enthusiastic about; the hosts met at Cambridge while doing history degrees.

I am not a historian, and it took me quite some time to understand which Richard we were talking about (it’s the one who supposedly killed the two princes in the tower) and why he’s considered a failure. There’s an assumption of knowledge throughout – Jones’s tone is quite “of course” when saying things such as: “Edward IV, who defeats the House of Lancaster at the battle of Towton in 1461 and becomes the first Yorkist king of England” – and I found myself confused. Were the two princes Edward IV’s kids then? Why is it wrong to “zoom in” on them rather than the battle of Bosworth? And Richard’s body “lay undiscovered for centuries” after Bosworth, did it? Why was that?

Day and Jones have a nice rapport and this is an enjoyable show. But some of us need a detailed intro, explaining who is being talked about and why they’re not considered a success. Otherwise, for listeners, this show is just How to Flail.

Photograph by Getty