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Welcome to Worth the Listen, a part of Pix Plus—Pix’s new subscription bundle that goes deeper into the entertainment picks that are actually worth your time.

This one is for you and the rest of the pod people who struggle every week to figure out what to listen to next. Because there is no more crushing sensation than tearing through an amazingly bingeable podcast and realizing with creeping dread that you're close to the final episode. Then you have to do the thing we all wish we could circumvent. You have to go on The Hunt. Friends, family, charts, all the things, as you search for what fills the podcast-shaped hole in your heart that used to be occupied by [insert name of your last favorite binge].

Worth the Listen is here to remove at least one bit of friction from your life. With every issue, you walk away with at least four options for what to listen to next. I go deep on one and provide toplines on the others.

So welcome, glad to have you aboard!

I'm Steve, the resident podcast person at Pix Media. I've spent 15 years inside audio, working on shows you've heard of (48 Hours, The Daily Show, RuPaul's Drag Race) and a lot you haven't. I've been in love with the medium since my first podcast around 2006, This Week In Tech, which tells you most of what you need to know about what kind of young adult I was. And I can still remember exactly where I was when I listened to Serial for the first time when it came out (on lunch breaks during Grand Jury Duty in NYC).

Every Wednesday going forward, you'll get a new email from me on what to play next and what's getting buzz for a reason. (Pix Plus subscribers also get full access to Worth the Watch, Worth the Read, and Worth the Chat.)

This week I'm starting with The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe, season five of a Novel-produced series I've followed since the start. The new season is currently in season, and it had me almost immediately. That's my test, whether a show earns the next episode by the end of the first one. Some are slower burns and worth the wait. Trust Me Babe didn't need the runway. Let's get into it.

This podcast covers coercive control, with a reference to non-consensual drug use later in the season. Sinfield flags content warnings as they come up and it felt right to do the same here.

iHeartPodcasts and Novel · Six eps · New every Monday · Hosted by Anna Sinfield

That's the phone call that turns The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe from a traditional con-man story into something more layered (and more fun). Wendy is standing on a busy shopping street in Maui when her phone rings. The caller is a stranger in San Francisco. Within minutes the two women are comparing receipts. Wendy has a file. (She isn't the only one.) Derek had a routine; he just didn't expect his marks to find each other.

The show builds off that conceit: What happens if all the women who were getting conned started connecting the dots in real time?

What I’m about to say is going to sound like a dodge, but stay with me.

I'm not going to tell you much more about the case than what iHeart and Novel say in the show description, which is that a group of women across the country realized they had all dated the same prolific romance scammer named Derek Alldred and decided to do something about it. That's the baseline premise and the show builds from there.

I listen to true crime cold whenever I can. I like to experience it all from fresh eyes/ears so those first episodes are doing real work: it's deciding what you know, when you know it, and whose voice you trust. So rest assured that if there are elements of surprise and joy in a pod, I will leave them for you to enjoy as the authors intended.

If you want to dig before listening, you can. Google has it all. But I'd argue you'll have a better time if you don't.

What elevates this past the case is the host, the prose, and the production. Anna Sinfield is a British investigative journalist who has been with the franchise since its first season and took over as lead host last year. She's sharp, funny, and warm without softening anything. I'll also confess that anything said in a British accent feels instantly more credible and smart to me. Take that for what you will.

Instagram @annasinfield

She knows when to step back and let a victim's own dry humor do the work, and when to land a line herself. There's a moment where Wendy decides she's done with Derek for good and changes her WiFi password to a phrase about him that is…spicy. I'll let you discover it. Sinfield's read of it is one of the better small comic beats I've heard in true crime this year. The show has a vibe, and that vibe is of a friend who has done her homework and has a really strong sense of humor (and access to great interview tape).

It is also produced by Novel, the British studio behind a long run of well-crafted true crime that, at least stateside, has not earned the prestige attention it deserves. The bite, the sound design, the pacing, the music, the sense that someone is actually editing for story rather than padding for download counts (not every true crime story needs 8 episodes to fulfill its promise). This is a Novel show, and it shows. Pulls you in, doesn't let go, and you're loving every minute of it.

Three companions for when you're ready to keep going.

(Sony Music / Neon Hum)

A different kind of scammer, a different audience to fool. For 30 years, Ryan Scott posed as a Catholic priest across small Midwestern towns, performing baptisms, taking confession, and quietly swindling millions from senior parishioners who showed up for the old-school Catholicism he promised. 

He worked through multiple aliases, moved on every time the questions got loud, and somehow has stayed out of prison. Native Iowan Alex Schuman finally tracks him down and gets him in a chair. The reporting is patient, careful with the people Scott hurt, and devastating. If what hooked you on Trust Me Babe is the slow network of people who finally refuse to stay quiet, this lands the same nerve.

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(Three Uncanny Four / Sony Music, 2021)

Ariel Levy of The New Yorker walks back through the Steinbergs, the New York family that built and then publicly imploded a 1980s financial empire. Galas, lawsuits, betrayals, a double life, a family estrangement, the slow-motion collapse of Reliance. If Trust Me Babe is what happens when a scammer picks the wrong group of women, this is what happens when a family with too much money turns on itself. Ariel Levy is one of the best writers working in audio.

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(Novel / iHeart, 2023)

If Trust Me Babe is your first season of the franchise, the original is where to go next. Carole Fisher tells the story of how she dated and then helped investigate Bob, the apparently lovely New York plastic surgeon whose first wife had quietly disappeared years earlier. The 1985 disappearance, the women who finally pieced it together. The same network DNA, deeper backstory. Won the 2024 Ambie for Best True Crime Podcast and is optioned by A24 for TV adaptation.

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Steve covers podcasts for Pix Media, where he writes Worth the Listen. He also runs Sine Wave Strategies and writes the Media, Built newsletter on LinkedIn. When he's not listening to podcasts, he's raising a 6-year-old and a ragdoll cat (possibly not in that order).

Currently listening to: The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe (still bingeing)