We Love This New True Crime Podcast

I spent the weekend cleaning up the backyard and binging the new Serial podcast, The Idiot.

I highly recommend the latter activity, which meets the sensationalized criteria of the true crime genre—there’s a murder plot and hints of shadowy dark money figures—but does so with a darkly funny and oddly poignant family drama payoff.

Here’s everything you need to know about the podcast—and why you should listen, too.

What is The Idiot about?

The Idiot is a new true crime podcast from New York Times’ columnist and former New Yorker staffer M. Gessen that looks at the unfortunate reality of intimate partner violence from a deeply personal angle. In 2022, a member of Gessen’s extended family conspired to have his ex-wife killed as a means of ending a dangerously escalating custody dispute over their two young children.

It was an unexpected plot development in the remarkably accomplished Gessen family that generated no shortage of family drama.

Who’s The Idiot?

The family member that generated the drama is Gessen’s first cousin, lawyer and Russian expat Allen Gessen. He’s currently serving a 10-year prison sentence in the U.S. after being convicted in 2024 of soliciting an undercover FBI agent to have his ex-wife and the mother of his two children murdered.

What’s so great about The Idiot?

The podcast is short—there are only five episodes and most episodes are under an hour long—but Gessen covers a lot of ground in that time. More importantly, the Russian-American journalist includes the voices of the principals—they speak to Gessen’s target, his ex-wife Priscilla, and even Allen himself.

The podcast runs through the substance of the charges, detailing the nature of the conspiracy itself, as well as offer up a rich human backstory that fills in what court transcripts can’t.

What emerges from this all-too-rare access to the real-life actors within the drama is a deeply humane and often darkly funny treatment of a truly grim subject matter.

A co-production between Serial productions—yes, that Serial, the groundbreaking true crime podcast that birthed a million imitators—and The New York Times—The Idiot is a wry interrogation into the complex nature of the darkest of family dramas, and it’s one that delivers one or two poignant surprises, too.

I finished the last episode with an all-too-rare feeling: I wanted more.