Bingeworthy: The Art & Craft Of Narrative Podcasts

 The word "binge" has gone through numerous transformations over the last 50 years. At one time, it was used primarily as an adjective before "drinking" and "eating." The connotation of "binge" was negative. 

Then "binge" suddenly became imbued with new meaning at the beginning of the 21st Century, and that negative stigma dissipated.

That's when Netflix began releasing a season of episodes for its original series on one day. Suddenly, a new meaning was born for "binge." Actually two. You could "Netflix and chill" and then "binge" an entire season in a day or a few days. Calling in sick to complete the media binge was acceptable.

Thankfully for podcasters, award-winning documentary filmmaker, narrative podcast producer and cultural critic Samantha Hodder added the term "binge" to podcasting.

Her Substack newsletter Bingeworthy is the mother ship for narrative podcast opinion, review, trends, and analysis. Hodder began the newsletter in September 2022 and has already amassed an impressive following. 

 You can subscribe to Bingeworthy here. Bingeworthy is a listener-supported newsletter.

Here's how Hodder explained Bingeworthy: "Everyone knows that pickleball is not tennis, and it’s not badminton. Even if you’ve never played pickleball, you know not to bring a badminton racquet to that game. That’s because you know pickleball is its own sport, with its own rules…ones that are both similar and different to its neighboring sports.

"I want the same thing for podcasts. But I want Bingeworthy to help us see narrative podcasts as their own thing. Not chatcasts. Not celeb gossip. Not short news segments. Narrative podcasts, or narrative audio, or narrative storytelling…whatever you want to call it…is its own thing.

"And my goal with Bingeworthy is to help celebrate that thing. That space. Those stories, the people who make them, the craft that becomes them and the underlying industry that makes that all happen."

Samantha Hodder is called a multihypenate -- someone who does several different jobs in the entertainment industry—and does them well. 

Samantha is an award-winning audio producer and writer. She has been making media across multiple formats for over two decades. She publishes regularly on Medium and on Substack. Her narrative storytelling podcast This is Our Time launched in 2017. It is a memoir-based story about an all-women’s expedition to Antarctica for women. Season 2 was featured in the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in 2021. She works as a freelance podcast producer, editor and narration script advisor. This year, she began to teach and mentor students at TMU and OCADU in narrative podcasting.

She also works with other writers and creatives one-on-one to help them find a winning narrative structure for their projects. To see if this approach could be helpful to your work, find her free 5-day email course Find Your Fish, which draws on lessons from screenwriting, podcasting, journaling and mindful meditation.

Over the last two decades her writing has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and her interactive work has premiered at festivals internationally. She was the recipient of the Al Waxman Calling Card for her first documentary, The Mantelpiece, which was broadcast on TVOntario, and premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Festival in 2004. Her short film The Nothingness That Is Everything opened in Venice, Italy in 2018.

So what kinds of articles are published in Bingeworthy? 

We have the Bingeworthy's Top 23 narrative podcasts for 2023. As Hodder notes: "Carefully tracked, noted and measured, the inaugural Bingey List aims to highlight the best shows of the narrative podcast world and shine a light on an amazing body of work." Included in hr list is her # 2 (and my #1) Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's. 

In her most recent newsletter post, Hodder discusses three podcasts she's listened to, including Ripple. Hodder notes: "Part environmental caper, part climate actuality doomsday report, part good old-fashioned door-knocking journalism. For those who think they recall the largest oil spill in North America, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill off the Gulf Coast of Alabama in 2010, but can’t exactly remember all the horrid details, this series is here to remind you."

I have listened to this investigative podcast, and Hodder is prescient. The podcast is powerful in its observations, disturbing in its revelations, and insightful in its solutions.

Then Hodder interviews Claire Tighe about the freelancing, which is essentially employment without a net. 

Check out Bingeworthy. It's custom-built for fans of narrative podcasting. Samantha Hodder is a superb journalist with a quick wit, an inviting writing style, and an innate sense of "bingeworthy" podcasts.

In summary, Bingeworthy offers reviews, critiques, insights, and discussions about the art and craft of narrative podcasts.

Hodder's goal is a noble one: "To bring narrative podcasts out from the fringe shadows; To make them a subject of critical discussion; To see them recognized as their own storytelling format."