Slow Burn: Various Seasons
4.9/5
Critic Rating
In Slow Burn’s 10th season, host Josh Levin takes you back to a crucial inflection point in American history: the moment between 2000 and 2004 when Fox News first surged to power and a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it.You’ll hear from the hosts, reporters, and producers who built Fox News, many who’ve never spoken publicly. You’ll also hear from Fox’s biggest antagonists—the political operatives, journalists, and comedians who attacked it, investigated it, and tried to mock it into submission. And you’ll hear from Fox’s victims, who are still coming to...
Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Lauren Passell • Podcast The Newsletter • Oct 7, 2024
"(Season: The Rise of Fox News) Unsurprisingly the new season of Slow Burn, on the rise of Fox News, is incredible. The shocking thing is how quickly this has all happened, how recent some of these stories are. Also shocking, the real origin of the name Fox & Friends. This isn’t just a great history, it’s fucking juicy."
Score: 5
Lauren Passell • Podcast The Newsletter • Jul 14, 2024
"(Season: Gays Against Briggs) Slow Burn does this thing that makes you feel like you lived through historical events even if you didn’t. It always does this, this season was no exception.This series is precious and could not be a more important listen."
Score: 5
Clair Woodward • The Times UK • Jul 7, 2024
"(Season: Gays Against Briggs) This moving and powerful series shows how it mobilised gay people to speak to neighbours and come out to their families to show that gay people were everywhere. …"
Score: 5
Rebecca Lavoie, Kevin Flynn, Lara Bricker & Toby Ball • Crime Writers On • Jun 27, 2024
"(Season: Gays Against Briggs) Rebecca thought host Christina Cauterucci lives up to the high storytelling standard of series originator Leon Neyfakh. Kevin took solace seeing historical cases of society being persuaded to change its attitudes for the better, giving him hope for progress today."
Score: 5
Hannah Verdier • The Guardian • May 30, 2024
"(Season: Gays Against Briggs) Hearing about so much bigotry goes from ridiculous to sickening as it becomes relentless, but it’s a tale that needs to be heard."
Score: 5
Patricia Nicol • The Times UK • Jun 19, 2022
"(Season: Roe V. Wade) A timely and necessary listen. …"
Score: 5
Fiona Sturges • Financial Times • Jun 5, 2022
"(Season: Roe vs. Wade) Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/18942132-72fc-4464-89b4-b6c79b6fad1a Slow Burn doesn’t deal in chronological storytelling, preferring to parachute the listener into different flashpoints in the narrative. In doing so, it cuts straight to the human stories behind big political moments, and shows us how the past informs the present."
Score: 4.9
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • Nov 4, 2021
"(Season 6) Slate’s flagship audio-documentary series continues apace. Slow Burn’s general method is to convey the memory of what it was viscerally like to live through a thick historical moment. The approach falls from one of its core arguments: that the past never really ends, and that the present is abundant with unresolved tensions that echo through time over and over again."
Score: 4.8
Antonia Quirke • New Statesman • Jul 1, 2020
"[Season 4] Each intense episode here is so perfectly calibrated. It’s particularly effective hearing that (David Duke) voice on the radio, of course – disembodied. He might have been behind a white sheet. …"
Score: 4.5
Jake Greenberg • PodcastReview.org • Dec 13, 2019
"[Season 3] The work Slow Burn does to clearly document the Tupac-Biggie relationship makes for an admirable piece of reporting. Season 3 proves that the Slow Burn method, of using the distance of a couple decades to reconsider and reorganize recent history, is amenable, and capable of much more than revisiting the White House. …"
Score: 4.7
Erin Bury • Quill Inc. • Nov 23, 2019
"[Season 1 & 2] If you want a Wikipedia-style overview, this isn’t it. But if you’re like me, and you’ve always wanted to know more about two of the century’s biggest political scandals, then this is well worth the listen."
Score: 5
Fiona Sturges • Financial Times • Aug 18, 2018
"[Season 2] Like its predecessor, the second Slow Burn is an electrifying portrait of a political scandal, full of surreal detail and surprising twists, and made all the more potent when heard in the era of #MeToo."
Score: 5
Andrew Liptak • The Verge • Apr 8, 2018
"[Season 1] While Nixon’s resignation now feels as though it was the logical, natural outcome, Neyfakh paints a far different picture of the four years that followed the Watergate break-in. The efforts to investigate and impeach the president faced almost insurmountable obstacles —including Nixon trying to shut down the investigation while firing people — which have taken on a new resonance in 2018. By focusing on these characters, the show brings a new depth to what listeners know about the scandal, providing tangible examples of the people who worked to push the investigation forward."
Score: 5
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • Jan 11, 2018
"Slow Burn is a dense listen, though it never really feels that way. Slow Burn goes down easy despite its hefty portent. It’s constantly surprising. It’s addictive for the right kind of casual history nerd. It’s smart in its composition. Slow Burn has a pleasantly simple and deliberate construction. It should be noted that Slow Burn isn’t just a solid exercise in the history podcast genre. The project was developed with a more timely concern in mind, which is to ask: How can the past help us understand the present?"
Score: 4
Catherine Nixey • The Times UK • Dec 8, 2017
"[Season 1] History is rarely about the past. More often than not it is the present in costume. And if you are happy with history as parable and paradigm rather than impartial chronicle, then this is corking. Those coiffed women and their swindling men are riveting."
