The Problem with Pearl-Clutching Podcasts: When Storytelling Goes Nowhere

Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA

I love podcasts, I think they're great, really. Lately, I’ve found myself exhausted by a particular brand of podcast storytelling—one that centers white sadness, nostalgia, and pain, only to ultimately arrive at… nothing. These stories follow a well-worn formula: a young podcaster embarks on a deeply personal journey, tracing the roots of some tragic figure from their past. Maybe it’s their mother’s ex-lover, a punk rocker turned drug dealer who was shot by the cops (The Ballad of Billy Balls). Maybe it’s a con artist who scammed the wealthy (Gallery of Lies). The production is slick, the music is moody, and yet, when all is said and done, the narrative offers no real catharsis, no deeper understanding—just another white story, meticulously packaged but fundamentally empty.

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The Moment I Saw It Clearly: The Ballad of Billy Balls

I remember exactly when this frustration crystallized: listening to The Ballad of Billy Balls. The premise sounded promising—iO Tillett Wright, a young podcaster, sets out to uncover the truth about a man she’s heard about her entire life: her mother’s former lover, Billy Balls. He was a punk rocker, a drug dealer, a tragic figure shot under mysterious circumstances in 1982. He wasn’t her father, but he loomed over her mother’s past in a way that seemed to demand excavation.

So she investigates. She talks to people who knew him. She pieces together the night of the shooting. And the grand reveal? The bust happened. The guy got shot. And… that’s it. There’s no deeper revelation about the criminal justice system, no piercing critique of police violence, no real understanding of addiction, punk subcultures, or the broader social forces at play. Instead, it’s a story about a white woman feeling a sense of loss over a man she never knew, given an entire season’s worth of dramatic narration, melancholy music, and reflective pauses.

And I thought—how many stories like this do we need?

How many hours of podcasting are devoted to the unresolved emotions of white narrators piecing together the tragedies of their past? And how many of these stories, ultimately, are just aesthetic exercises in sadness, where nothing of substance is interrogated? There's like, a lot of them. pratically every season of iHeartRadio is a version of this paradigm.

It’s not just The Ballad of Billy Balls. iHeartRadio has seemingly built an entire podcast empire—now spanning seven seasons across multiple projects—that recycles this same pearl-clutching approach. Wild Boys follows a bizarre real-life hoax but ultimately leans into the same self-indulgent style, leaving little room for deeper sociopolitical analysis; albeit there's a lot of really nice Canadians. Gallery of Lies is perhaps the worst offender—a multi-episode podcast that is, at its core, only about how a millionaire got caught stealing from a billionaire, and two German ones at that. It’s hard to find the stakes in a story where everyone involved is already absurdly wealthy, yet it’s presented with the same somber, high-production treatment as if it holds some grand revelation. Even Scam Likely, a podcast that I expected would dive into the systemic exploitation of working-class people through scams, payday lenders, and economic abuse, ends up sticking to the same pearl-clutching formula. The victims, at least based on how they’re presented, all sound white, which is obviously not the full picture. The racial and economic realities of financial scams—who they truly target, why they flourish, and how predatory capitalism enables them—are largely ignored.

Who Gets to Have Their Pain Amplified?

I kept wondering: Has there been a podcast like this about the young Black men killed by police? Where a grieving sister or cousin gets to trace the history of her loved one, following every lead, every witness, with a high-budget production and narrative focus? Sure, there are true crime podcasts that touch on racial injustice, but they often treat these cases as cases—sensational, shocking, dissected for public consumption. What I rarely see is the same indulgent space given to Black grief, immigrant trauma, or the long echoes of systemic violence in the way that white suffering is treated with this almost reverential, poetic melancholy.

And let’s be honest—the difference is funding. Podcasting is a billion-dollar industry. It has become a space where celebrities launch shows just to chat about their lives. The other day I listened to Bill Burr make fun of his belly and call Elon Musk a weenie, are you not entertained! Investigative journalism seem reserved for narratives that already fit within a comfortable frame. Where stories that should challenge us instead flatten themselves into something palatable, avoiding difficult conclusions.

The Difference Between Empty Storytelling and Stories That Matter

That’s why The Ballad of Billy Balls and podcasts like it bother me so much. It wasn’t that the story itself was bad—it was just so shallow, so self-involved, so uninterested in making meaning of its own tragedy. Compare this to S-Town, which begins as a murder mystery and transforms into a deeply philosophical exploration of class, mental health, and Southern identity. Or The Trojan Horse Affair, which takes what could have been a dry local news scandal and turns it into a searing critique of Islamophobia and institutional bias. Or The Fall of Civilizations, which doesn’t just recount history but makes us feel its weight, its patterns, its warnings. Or my personal favorite, Heavyweight which somehow gives you a sense of grace and pleasing storytelling every damn time--Jonathan Goldstein how do you do it!

I love storytelling. I love podcasts. But I’m tired of the ones that mistake white grief for depth. I want more stories that take risks, that expose unseen histories, that amplify voices we rarely hear.

So, tell me—what are the podcasts that move you? What stories have truly expanded your perspective?