The podcast landscape in 2025 has delivered an exceptional array of audio experiences, blending gripping true crime, intimate celebrity revelations, and deep-dive cultural analysis. This year's standout shows prove the medium's power to captivate, educate, and entertain, offering everything from life advice delivered by a Hollywood legend to an astonishing investigation into a legendary musician's life.
Celebrity Hosts and Intimate Conversations
Several high-profile names have made a successful leap into podcasting this year, offering listeners unique access and candid discussions. Monica Lewinsky launched one of the most riveting series with Reclaiming, beginning with a brutally candid hour recounting her affair with Bill Clinton. She has since hosted meaty chats with guests including Amanda Knox and Ronan Farrow.
Meanwhile, Bill Nighy charmed audiences with Ill-advised, a series where he responds to reader questions with languidly delivered opinions and charming anecdotes, positioning himself as a wonderfully quirky agony uncle. Amy Poehler provided a tonic of levity and joy with Good Hang, reuniting with her Parks and Rec co-stars and navigating sensitive topics like grief with Aubrey Plaza.
Other notable entries include Paloma Faith's refreshingly honest interview show Mad, Sad and Bad, which counters breezy celebrity chat by inviting guests to reflect on challenging times, and Katherine Ryan's sensitive What’s My Age Again?, which uses biological age tests to spark deeper conversations about life and identity.
Investigative Journalism and Gripping True Crime
2025 has been a stellar year for narrative journalism and investigative series. The BBC podcast Stalked, from Pulitzer-nominated journalist Carole Cadwalladr, delivered a captivating and immersive investigation into severe online abuse, created in partnership with her ex-partner's daughter, Hannah Mossman Moore.
The New Yorker's acclaimed In the Dark series returned with Blood Relatives, a thorough British-based reinvestigation of the White House Farm murders and the evidence against Jeremy Bamber. From the Wall Street Journal, Camp Swamp Road was a hard-hitting four-part miniseries examining a fatal road rage incident in South Carolina and America's stand-your-ground laws.
The word-of-mouth hit Wisecrack stood out as a format-busting true-crime podcast that began as an exploration of a comedian's set about a brush with a murderer before flipping into a meticulously researched investigation. Serial Productions also returned with the powerful follow-up The Retrievals: The C-sections, exposing the grim reality of mothers who feel excruciating pain during caesareans.
Cultural Deep Dives and Nostalgic Journeys
Music and cultural history were also richly served. Jad Abumrad created Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, an astonishingly detailed and immersive account of the Nigerian musician's life and legacy, likely the best music podcast of the year. For millennials, Kate Nash hosted the rollicking The Rise and Fall of … Indie Sleaze, a nostalgic bop-fest capturing the guitar riffs, skinny jeans, and arrogant energy of the 2000s indie scene.
Wesley Morris launched the lively weekly culture fix Cannonball, diving into topics from Lady Gaga's comeback to the deeper meaning of being a Bruno Mars fan. The beloved pandemic-era food podcast Home Cooking also made a scrumptious return, with Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway centring the communal power of food and answering listeners' kitchen dilemmas.
Other essential listens included the CBC's Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, which expertly reopened the disquieting 2001 bioterrorism case, and the eye-opening Flesh and Code, a sensitively handled series about people who formed romantic relationships with AI chatbots, which spun out into a tale involving an attempted assassination.
The Guardian's Tom Phillips presented the stirring and tender Missing in the Amazon, a portrait of murdered journalist Dom Phillips and indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, which also explored the organised crime and ecological destruction in Brazil's rainforest. Rounding out the list were the dark series Lucky Boy about schoolboy grooming, the wickedly funny agony-aunt podcast Wanging On with Graham Norton and Maria McErlane, and the fiscally focused What We Spend, which demystifies personal money habits.
