1000 Tiny Birds

We Were Three

Podcast, 2023-02-16

I picked up the habit in the last couple of years of deliberately not listening to music on my way back home from a concert - something about letting the live music sit with me - and instead replacing it with something spoken word. On my train back from Weird Al, I started on We Were Three, the latest podcast from Serial Productions, which rang a bell because Soccer Mommy did the score for it. A one-shot three-parter, We Were Three initially focuses in on a family in the aftermath of Covid, one daughter dealing with the deaths of her anti-vax father and brother, and trying to understand how this situation came to be. It then really nicely zooms out, broaden its horizons, and digs further back into their past to not just understand the Covid issues, but the pre-existing fractures. What emerges is a fascinating tale of family life, of domestic abuse, of the impact we have on each other. Nancy Updike hosts it with great empathy and care, with an understanding of how innately one-sided this story has to be, but never over-correcting or being overly credulous either. It’s smart enough not to stretch itself too far, a lesson many other podcasts could do with learning.