Podcasts: Lena Dunham and a ‘megachurch’ scandal

Featuring The C-Word, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Drilled, and The Tip Off

Lena Dunham: back with the ‘compelling’ The C-Word
Lena Dunham: back with the ‘compelling’ The C-Word
(Image credit: Vince Bucci/Getty Images for Friendly House)

“She is perpetually mocked for her lack of self-awareness, insensitivity, hairless cats, repeated failed Twitter apologies and privilege,” said James Marriott in The Times. But for me, Lena Dunham will always be the “genius” behind the hit show Girls. She has now returned with The C-Word, a new podcast that aims to filter through the rumours about women who have gone down in history as (in Dunham’s words) “mad, sad or just plain bad”. Annoyingly, the show is on Luminary, “a paid-for podcast app used by precisely nobody I’ve met”, but its episodes are periodically made available for free through Spotify and Apple. The latest one, on Amy Winehouse, is typically “compelling”, filled with quick-fire delivery and “psychological acuity” from both Dunham and her co-host, the “‘historian’ of bad behaviour” Alissa Bennett.

Now in its sixth season, Drilled, by the award-winning journalist Amy Westervelt, is billed as “a true crime show about the climate crisis”, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. It isn’t quite like a true crime show: you can mostly guess “whodunnit” from the start. But the way Westervelt explores “how big firms put profit over sustainability” is forensic and gripping. Drilled is a podcast that “tells the stories we need to know”. And anyone curious about how this kind of investigative journalism works should listen to Maeve McClenaghan’s show The Tip Off: it is an “excellent” examination of “how stories reach our newspaper pages”. Surprising details come thick and fast: over the course of the series, we learn that every police force in Britain has a press officer, and that investigative reporters often turn out to be “painstakingly good at tracking down sources via LinkedIn”. It’s enough to make you completely “reassess everyday journalism”.

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