One of the best OG true crime podcasts

Happy post-Labor Day, hope everyone got to spend some quality time with friends and family. We packed everyone up for the beach and only spent 30% of our time trying to get the collective mass (swarm, murder) of children to put down the iPads and go in the ocean, which they loved when they finally did.

Yup, those iPad games are totally not messing with my kids' heads and remain an A+ parenting choice brought on by the pandemic.

So. Up and Vanished. It was in my footer a couple of weeks back, but it has been on my list to recommend for about four months, and I keep putting it off. Partly because it is fifteen hours long (well, fourteen hours and fifty-two minutes, across the twenty-five numbered episodes, and yes I counted, and yes there is a pile of bonus episodes in between that I am going to tell you to skip on a first pass). But mostly because it is the show that a huge amount of what you listen to now is descended from, so there is…a lot.

So let's step into the wayback machine and talk about how this all began…

In 2016, a filmmaker in Atlanta named Payne Lindsey went looking for a cold case to make a documentary about, which he tells you in the first episode. He had been obsessed with Serial (as were all of us), so he went to Google and landed on the 2005 disappearance of Tara Grinstead, a high school teacher and former beauty queen from Ocilla, Georgia, whose case had gone a decade without an arrest. He posted on a forum, and someone called him back within the hour. Somewhere in there, he decided the documentary should be a podcast, and said, out loud, on tape, in his own first episode, “I am not a podcaster, and I'm definitely not an investigator.”

Which, knowing where Payne is now, is kind of a trip to read. We all start somewhere.

Before I go further, a note. This program includes discussions of suicide.

What you are actually listening to is a guy with new microphones, a grandmother who lives half an hour from the town in question and who turns out to be surprisingly useful, a private investigator who has been working the case for years and is extremely happy someone called, and a small Georgia town that has been sitting on the same story for a decade and has a lot to say about it. You can feel the learning curve, and also how deeply authentic and raw it is, which I think makes for deeply compelling tape. There is no known ending when he starts, and it really is a collective journey between him, the listener, and the people he speaks with.

It feels like a thing that would be far more difficult to pull off today in a world where podcasting has inundated the land.

And then, about halfway through the season, somewhat amazingly, the cold case gets significantly less cold.

Pix Plus subscribers get Steve's pick for this week, plus three podcasts you'd never find on your own.