Podcast Canon: No Feeling Is Final and Appearances push the limits of the art form

With Podcast Canon, Benjamin Cannon analyzes the history of podcasts and interrogates how we talk about the art form.

If someone were to ask you to think of an archetypal Sundance movie, I have no doubt that you—dear reader of this particular site—have dozens which spring to mind. For the record, mine are Happy, Texas, and Hamlet 2. No, but seriously, films like Reservoir Dogs, Boyhood, and Memento come to mind for the ways they stretched our understanding of conventional narrative structure and their novel filmmaking approaches. 

You may not know it, but for over two decades, the audio world has had its own version of a festival like Sundance: Chicago’s Third Coast International Audio Festival. Inaugurated in 2000, Third Coast has been the place for artistic audio creators to gather, foster a creative community, and celebrate transcendent works of narrative radio documentary—and eventually podcasts as well. Past winners at the festival have included Radiolab, S-Town, and Heavyweight, among others. 

This month, right as Sundance kicks off, I want to look at two podcasts with strong ties to Third Coast and investigate the kinds of audio being made outside the mainstream. Those works which seek to tell intensely personal stories, in a labor-intensive fashion, and for no immediate commercial gain. In this current hustle culture, where all content should be made as easily as possible for maximum return on investment, it’s worth stopping and elevating those audio creators choosing to use the medium to its fullest without a cynical bent. That these two shows exist at all is something of a minor miracle.

The two programs I’m inducting into the Podcast Canon today are exemplary works of artistic audio that never sacrifice their narrative thrust for the sake of experimentation. They equally do not shy away from their own complexity, exploring life’s manifold joys, pains, and the liminal spaces in between. They are 2018’s No Feeling Is Final—from writer and presenter Honor Eastly and produced by Joel Werner and Alice Moldovan—and 2020’s Appearances, the singular work of writer, performer, producer, and sound designer Sharon Mashihi.

On their faces, these two shows seem to have little in common: Appearances is ostensibly a work of autofiction about a woman in her mid-30s seeking to start a family on her own, while No Feeling Is Final is a work of narrative documentary about a woman living with the challenges of a major mood disorder and the persistent suicidal ideation that comes with it.  

It’s in their approaches that one finds their symmetry, in ways both mundane and profound. For example, both include a prologue episode to familiarize listeners with their unique world and the challenges of presenting it to an audience. Both shows’ first episodes are about voices. There is quite a lot of crying that happens in each series. Where Appearances strikes a sometimes more serious tone, No Feeling Is Final explores its oftentimes distressing subject matter with a surprising amount of levity—without occluding the pain at its core. Appearances is about pulling away from community for the sake of a chance at a long-sought-after life, and in No Feeling Is Final, one gets the distinct sense that it is community that gives Eastly the strength to go on living. 

As well, at Third Coast—in 2018 and 2019, respectively—both creators won awards for their works. Mashihi took home Silver in Best Documentary for “Man Choubam (I Am Good),” an episode originally made for KCRW’s UnFictional and Kaitlin Prest’s The Heart, Mashihi’s long-term creative home. That episode, an obvious catalyst for Appearances’ creation, is worth delving into as a companion piece. Eastly, meanwhile, won the Director’s Choice for No Feeling Is Final. 

A minor divergence, if you’ll allow, to understand why all of this is important to me. Podcasts are an unlikely place for formal experimentation. It sounds counterintuitive, given the expansive nature of the medium, but a certain homogeneity persists regardless. There are over two million shows in the English language alone, yet the vast majority operate within one of a set few frameworks informally established over time. Call it a crisis of success: one show becomes popular and creators work to replicate its sonic palette or conversational approach ad nauseam. 

You will likely go your entire life without encountering more than a tiny fraction of the podcasts that exist. As a critic of the medium for over a decade, I have built an extensive library of over 2,100 shows, and yet—believe you me—not all are worthy of close examination. A little quick and fuzzy math would suggest that fewer than 0.001% of the shows in the entire medium are works doing something different enough to achieve a level of distinction. 

I don’t say this to discourage, rather to drive home how hard it is to make a show at all, let alone one that can cut through the noise of the landscape, find an audience, and have its desired impact. It’s not enough for a show to be good; it needs an entire ecosystem to ensure it gets heard at all. 

What is it that makes these shows arthouse-quality programs then? For one, they’re unsparing in their self-examination. Appearances is attempting Nathan Fielder by way of Bertolt Brecht, with Mashihi using the show as a means to roleplay her own life in an attempt to weigh her mother’s reaction to her desire to have a baby as a single woman. The Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt—or estrangement effect, as it is presently translated—is on full display, as Mashihi voices virtually every single character in the series, including her own mother. What’s more, she also projects the story onto an avatar of herself, Melanie, who often breaks the fourth wall to discuss with Mashihi her choices in approaching the project itself. 

That is, until Mashihi breaks an additional fourth wall (fifth wall??) and communicates directly with the listener midway through the series about her own insecurities in telling this story. It’s an uncomfortable moment at first, but in it, she asks the defining question of the piece: “What would it be to make a good piece of work that is unsure of itself? Does such a thing exist or is the mark of great work the work’s own certainty of what it is?” This is Appearances’ skeleton key, raising all manner of questions about the way narrative cleanliness is championed above all else. If Appearances is to be seen as a benchmark then the medium desperately needs more work from audiomakers who come at their craft from a place of uncertainty. 

For No Feeling Is Final, Eastly and producers Werner and Moldovan are anything but uncertain about how to present their program. Each of the series’s six episodes strike very specific, yet distinct tones and points of view. For example, the second episode is an accounting of Eastly’s struggle to quickly find a therapist in Australia without going broke in the process. This seemingly herculean effort is given lift and direction by framing her plight as if Eastly is a contestant on some garish game show. Elsewhere, listeners are taken through the head-spinning history of every medication that Eastly has been prescribed, and an examination of the inefficacies of such pharmaceuticals as a class, writ large. There’s an element of Darren Aronofsky to the way these pieces are presented, aping the sort of drab repetition and whip-cut editing style of his Requiem For A Dream.

It’s worth underscoring that although the subject matter is heavy, the show is full of laughter, grace, warmth, and charm. Episodes don’t end so much as dissolve slowly into a song or piece of music that helps to ease the transition from Eastly’s world back into one’s own, replete with suggestions for self-care in case the subject matter touched a nerve. Throughout the episodes, we as an audience are both observing Eastly’s journey from afar and feeling implicated in it, as if we were a close confidant. This places listeners in a unique position of having to pick a side, either one of comfort or compassion.  

Both No Feeling Is Final and Appearances are of that rare breed of show as much—if not more—concerned about how they choose to tell their stories as the story itself. They stand out as remarkable achievements in the world of artistic audio-making and should serve as inspiration for current and future creatives operating in the space. Coming off a year of increased banalization in the podcast space, of another pivot to video, and the mainstreaming of so-called manosphere podcast bros, it’s important to champion works that are sometimes confronting, daring, and just downright weird. They may not be an easy path to financial reward, but just like many of the films at Sundance, they exist for the express purpose of allowing us to look at life from another perspective in the hopes that it might reveal something we never noticed before. 

As a footnote, it’s a bit of bad timing that I’m writing about artistically daring works of radio and podcasting in 2025, as the medium is once again in a moment of contraction. This month, BBC Radio Four ended Short Cuts after a 12-year run. The show has long been an important showcase and proving ground for many of the best producers of narrative documentary storytelling. It is without easy parallel in other media, a place where new voices and established creators are on even footing. Short Cuts has been made under the eminently kind and thoughtful direction of Falling Tree Productions’ Eleanor McDowall and Alan Hall, along with producers Alia Cassam, Axel Kacoutié, and Andrea Rangecroft. The names of the talent featured on the show are too long to reprint here, but they are among the brightest lights in the industry and have helped to shape the medium in many ways.