“Dirty John,” a suspenseful and psychologically intense true-crime series released in
its entirety last week, is the first podcast by the veteran newspaper
journalist Christopher Goffard. It’s a new kind of hybrid: a
podcast-and-print collaboration, between Wondery and the Los Angeles
Times. It was released chapter by chapter over the week, beginning one
Sunday and concluding the next, in the style of an investigative print
series. It’s garnered some five million listens and has been the No. 1
podcast on iTunes for much of the past two weeks. Its aesthetic is a
kind of journalism noir, blending entertainment and news in powerful,
sometimes unnerving ways.
The podcast begins with an autopsy report: an Orange County assistant
district attorney reading a description of stab wounds from a homicide
in the summer of 2016. We don’t learn the identity of the victim or the
assailant. Then we go back two years, to 2014, to the story of a
successful Newport Beach interior designer,…
