Podcast Corner: Family dramas from The Idiot to Peaky Blinders
Cillian Murphy is one of the guests on a podcast dedicated to Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.
Every family has its dramas, whether minor squabbles or epic sagas — you might even suspect one of yours deserves to be told.
The New York Times writer M. Gessen’s family story sprawls continents and is detailed in , a five-chapter series from Serial Productions. There are shades of as they outline, in the opening 20-minute episode the drama thus far.
They say they disliked their cousin Allen and considered him a fool, a pompous “international businessman” who bragged about shady deals and drove fancy cars. He arrives at M’s father’s 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.
M says: “I was shocked at how shocked I was… 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’ birthday parties?” In theory, they say, this thing could happen in any family. Thus the investigation begins into what made Allen do what he did.
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 — involving an overbearing, overpresent mother-in-law — 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’s star witness plays his undercover recordings of Allen.
The following chapter is the longest as Allen agrees to talk to M — for 35 hours of interviews. Over the course of their conversations, M. comes to feel for their cousin. “There 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.”
is farcical yet tender - a family drama writ large.
Another sort of family drama, by now Peaky Blinders fans will have already consumed , whether in cinemas or at home on Netflix.
The streamer has expanded into podcasts in recent months and while this six-parter can be watched on Netflix, it’s also widely available in audio form.
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.
