Empire on Blood is a complicated creature. There is a heartbreaking story at the center of this Panoply true-crime podcast, one that revolves around a once-powerful drug dealer who spent two decades in jail for a crime he did not commit. It hits a range of urgent, difficult issues: the systemic travesties of the American legal system, how one should square the life of a person who has done unambiguously bad things against a miscarriage of justice levied against him, and the pathways for black men to reclaim a genuine sense of freedom in a system that never offered them a clear shot at one in the first place.
But the tricky thing about Empire on Blood lies in its commitment to stylization and the subjective reality of its narrator, the journalist Steve Fishman (a contributing editor to New York Magazine and the host of last year’s Audible Original Ponzi Supernova). In the end, what we’re left with is a documentary project…
