This is Love
Criminal-obsessives, take heart. Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer, two women who REALLY love all things macabre, are cooking up a spin-off just in time to cure all you lovesick puppies this Valentine’s Day. Premiering on February 14, This is Love is a six-part weekly series about “sacrifice, obsession, and the ways in which we bet everything on each other.” Criminal itself turns four on February 12, and shows no signs of going anywhere. But This is Love promises to test their well-oiled machine into tackling a subject that is perhaps lighter, but also one that is close to every person tuning in. “We wanted to take on a topic as muddled and complicated as crime. Love is that one other thing, that one other thing that we cannot get enough of,” Judge explained in an interview with Vulture.
Love Life with Matthew Hussey
Whether you’re planning a romantic dinner date with the love of your life or staying in by yourself with a carefully curated Netflix playlist for company, Love Life with Matthew Hussey is your handbook for this month of love. The dating expert brings a lot of experience to the table — Hussey is a New York Times best-selling author, has a monthly relationship advice column in Cosmopolitan Magazine, and is the resident love expert on The Today Show — and the show reflects this. Coming in bite-sized lengths of 10 to 15 minutes, the episodes tackle everything from navigating online dating to dealing with annoying exes and keeping marriages alive. So, if you’re looking for some inspiration come February 14, you know who to hit up.
Modern Love
No podcast playlist about love is complete without Modern Love, New York Times’ and the Boston public radio station WBUR’s ode to matters of the heart. Hosted by the singularly effervescent Meghna Chakraborty, each episode of the series picks an essay from the extensive backlogs of the New York Times’ Modern Love column, gets an actor to perform the story, and ends with an interview with the essayist. Previous voice actors have included Greta Gerwig, Laura Dern, Issa Rae, Willem Dafoe, Minnie Driver, Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger. While you couldn’t go wrong with any episode picked from the series that celebrated its 100th episode last week, we recommend you begin with episode #18, A Heart Outrun, written by Gary Presley and read by Colin Farrell.
For a bit of fun...
The Onion delivers killer laughs
If you do one thing this week, make it tuning into The Onion’s A Very Fatal Murder. Directed by Ryan Nantoli and Fran Hoepfner, the podcast is a satire show that takes a dig at everyone’s favourite podcast genre — true crime. No one’s spared: From the well-meaning journalists and the sombre background scores to the morally ambiguous listeners and the eager sponsors.
Orchestrated by the people who bring us headline gold such as Woman Speaks For Record-Breaking 8 Hours Without Being Interrupted By Man, Justin Timberlake Pulling Panicked All-Nighter After Realizing New Album Due Tomorrow and Video Games Will Never Be Art, the six-part series that comes in 10- to 15-minute-long episodes is a laughter riot that lovingly distils the absurdities of the cultural phenomenon that was unleashed all the way back in 2014 by Serial.
Synopsis: A Very fatal Murder follows David Pascall, a reporter for Onion Public Radio (played by comedy writer David Sidorov), as he searches for the perfect “culturally relevant” murder around which he could build the next trending podcast, all the while assisted by a supercomputer. Pascall’s efforts to locate such a murder leads him to the fictional Nebraskan small town of Bluff Springs, where the murder of Hayley Price, the high-school prom queen, remains unsolved.
