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Stylist Loves
These 9 scripted podcasts are perfect if you feel like you don’t have time to read
By Amy Beecham
2 years ago
2 min read
Scripted podcasts are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to audiobooks – and these 9 should be on your radar.
Whether it’s motivation from BookTok or the fact 2023 looks set to be full of brilliant new-release titles, it feels safe to assume that most of us would like to read more than we currently do. However, it doesn’t always feel easy to carve a quiet half hour out of our busy lives to pick up a book.
Enter: scripted podcasts. Perfect for listening to on your commute, while working out or even in bed, these audio dramas span genre and plot, from medical mysteries to romantic comedies and detective series. Here are nine of the best to add to your queue now.
Greenhouse
A flower shop. Strangers exchanging letters and slowly falling in love. The meet-cute of dreams. If Greenhouse isn’t the perfect audio romcom, we really don’t know what is.
People Who Knew Me
From Bad Sisters’ Sharon Horgan and starring Rosamund Pike and Hugh Laurie, People Who Knew Me is a 10-part series based on Emily Morris, a woman who used 9/11 to fake her own death and run away to start a new life in California as Connie Prynne.
Margaret’s Garden
The American dream becomes the American nightmare in Margaret’s Garden, a suspenseful suburban audio drama where something beneath the pristine surface stirs and threatens to change everything.
Where The Stars Fell
This fantasy audio drama follows Dr Edison Tucker, a woman who cannot die, as she is thrown into a housemate-from-hell situation. Only, Lucille Kensington is actually her guardian angel and the rapture is coming for them both.
Patient 33
Discover firsthand what happens in a world of incompetent doctors, cynical nurses, therapists who need therapy and janitors who can’t clean, all heard from the perspective of a coma patient.
Eliza: A Robot Story
Eliza, the world’s first emotional robot, is owned and controlled by Him. She must quickly learn to navigate her own new emotions, as well as His, but Eliza lives in a world where the laws regulating robots mean that she can’t exist without Him. As she discovers her owner is not the man she thinks He is, can she escape a life built around His desires and needs?
A powerful story not just about evolving technology, but gender dynamics and coercive control.
What Can I Get Started For You?
For some light relief, try this slice-of-life comedy mini-series that tells the story of four New York baristas passing by work days with hilarious banter. What Can I Get Started For You inspects what it means to love a ‘day job’… even if the company is a little too comfortable paying minimum wage.
Small Victories
This dramatic comedy follows Marisol, a recently recovered drug addict, through the ups and downs of a week in her life. She may be trying for a fresh start, but it’s too bad the universe has it out for her.
Maxine Miles
For fans of Stranger Things, this is about the disappearance of a young person from Hastings, an idyllic small town in New Hampshire. Max investigates with her friend Ross and discovers the currents of deception and betrayal underneath Hastings’s polished surface.
Images: courtesy of podcasts
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