Every family has its dramas, whether minor squabbles or epic sagas \u2014 you might even suspect one of yours deserves to be told.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The New York Times writer M. Gessen\u2019s family story sprawls continents and is detailed in The Idiot, a five-chapter series from Serial Productions. There are shades of Heavyweight as they outline, in the opening 20-minute episode the drama thus far.<\/p>\n
They say they disliked their cousin Allen and considered him a fool, a pompous \u201cinternational businessman\u201d who bragged about shady deals and drove fancy cars. He arrives at M\u2019s father\u2019s home in Cape Cod from Russia, along with his mother and five-year-old son, claiming he has separated from and left his wife Priscilla behind in Moscow. M is suspicious. Soon afterwards, Allen is arrested after allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill Priscilla.<\/p>\n
M says: \u201cI was shocked at how shocked I was\u2026 How does something like this happen? How had it happened right here in my family, in between our silly dinners and chess games and kids\u2019 birthday parties?\u201d In theory, they say, this thing could happen in any family. Thus the investigation begins into what made Allen do what he did.<\/p>\n
The ensuing four episodes vary from 28 minutes to over an hour and are fascinating in that we get both sides of the story. In episode two, Priscilla details a fraught, violent living arrangement \u2014 involving an overbearing, overpresent mother-in-law \u2014 that devolves into court orders and Allen kidnapping their child and heading for the US. His subsequent trial in San Francisco takes up episode three, wherein the FBI\u2019s star witness plays his undercover recordings of Allen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The following chapter is the longest as Allen agrees to talk to M \u2014 for 35 hours of interviews. Over the course of their conversations, M. comes to feel for their cousin. \u201cThere had been such longing in his voice when he asked about [his] kids. At some point I realised that the kids were the reason he decided to talk to me, to make his case to me and through me and the broadcast medium to his kids that he never wanted to kill his mother.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n The Idiot is farcical yet tender – a family drama writ large.<\/p>\n
Another sort of family drama, by now Peaky Blinders fans will have already consumed The Immortal Man, whether in cinemas or at home on Netflix.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The streamer has expanded into podcasts in recent months and while this six-parter can be watched on Netflix, it\u2019s also widely available in audio form.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This companion podcast features creators, special guests, and stars including Cillian Murphy as they join host Edith Bowman to unpack the world of the Shelbys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every family has its dramas, whether minor squabbles or epic sagas \u2014 you might even suspect one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[57997,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-373922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-podcast-corner","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}