A pair of headphones is sometimes all it takes to leave the world you’re in. Fiction podcasts can take you from a crowded train to a fantasy kingdom or a different planet. Whether you want to go on an adventure or solve mysteries, these fiction podcasts offer an easy way to escape reality whenever you press play.
1. Welcome to Night Vale: Desert Town Mystery
Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor met through the New York Neo-Futurists, a theater company where they also worked alongside future Night Vale narrator Cecil Baldwin. Fink pitched a fake community radio show for a desert town where every conspiracy theory turned out to be true, and Welcome to Night Vale premiered on June 15, 2012. The format follows old audio drama conventions, presenting each episode as a twice monthly broadcast from Night Vale Community Radio. It even has a weather segment that is really just a song.
Within a year, the show had climbed to number one on iTunes, and it has since passed 100 million downloads. Underneath the comedy is a full sci fi podcast core, held together by time loops and a scientist named Carlos whose research into the town’s physics never adds up. Fun fact: Welcome to Night Vale traces back to an earlier collaborative project called Commonplace Books, a 2010 anthology built from unfinished story ideas left behind by H.P. Lovecraft.
2. Wolf 359: Deep Space Drama
Gabriel Urbina created Wolf 359 in early 2014, releasing it through his own production company, Kinda Evil Genius Productions, in the tradition of Golden Age radio dramas. The story follows Doug Eiffel, communications officer aboard the USS Hephaestus, a research station orbiting the red dwarf star Wolf 359 nearly eight light years from Earth, alongside commander Renee Minkowski and an unstable scientist named Hilbert. Urbina and writer Sarah Shachat wrote most scripts, though actors Emma Sherr-Ziarko and Zach Valenti each got to write an episode of their own too.
The show earned a 2016 Audioverse Awards nomination for Best Speculative Fiction Audio Drama. Composer Alan Rodi’s score gave the whole series a beautiful audio drama feel, close to old serialized radio. Fun fact: Wolf 359’s two hour series finale, released on Christmas Day 2017, was described by creator Gabriel Urbina as an audio only movie.
3. Midnight Burger: Cosmic Diner Comedy
Joe Fisher and Finlay Stevenson created Midnight Burger in 2020 during the early pandemic lockdowns. The show follows Gloria, who takes a waitressing position at a diner outside Phoenix, only to learn the diner teleports somewhere new in the universe every day.
Midnight Burger has grown across multiple seasons plus side stories like the Young Leif miniseries and Welcome to the Horizon. Each episode of this storytelling podcast opens with a new customer walking through Midnight Burger’s door needing something, and the plot spins outward from there. Fun fact: Midnight Burger’s fans hold an in-person gathering called Burger Con.
4. Limetown: Vanishing Town Mystery
Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie met as students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the idea for Limetown started in 2013 when Akers asked Bronkie a simple question: what if an entire town disappeared? They spent nights and weekends writing scripts alongside day jobs, with Akers producing sports documentaries and Bronkie directing commercials in Silicon Valley. They released the first episode through their own company, Two-Up Productions, on July 29, 2015. The story follows Lia Haddock, a reporter for American Public Radio, investigating the disappearance of over 300 people.
Limetown climbed to the number one spot on iTunes within two months of release. The show won Best Fiction Podcast at the 2016 Academy of Podcasters Awards and was nominated in the same category at the 2020 iHeartRadio Podcast Awards. Limetown later crossed into television too, as a 2019 Facebook Watch series adaptation with Jessica Biel and Stanley Tucci. A prequel novel co-written with novelist Cote Smith later expanded the story beyond its original two seasons. Fun fact: Akers found out Limetown had hit number one on iTunes while setting up the reception hall for his wedding, which took place the next day.
5. The Bright Sessions: Superpowered Therapy Sessions
Lauren Shippen was working as an actor in Los Angeles when she started The Bright Sessions in 2015 as a low budget project with friends, centered on a girl who could travel through time. That character, Sam, became one of three patients seen by therapist Dr. Joan Bright, alongside a telepath Chloe and an empath Caleb, with each therapy session doubling as a way to reveal the wider plot through dialogue instead of narration. Shippen voiced Sam herself, wrote every episode, and composed the show’s original music and sound effects for its first sixteen episodes before sound designer Mischa Stanton joined in 2016.
The Bright Sessions became a defining audio drama of the mid 2010s, picking up seven Audioverse Awards. Shippen co-founded the production company Atypical Artists in 2019, using it to launch spin offs and give other creators of fiction podcasts a home for their own shows. She later wrote and directed other drama podcasts including Passenger List and Bridgewater, and launched a yearly series called New Year’s Day in 2024. Fun fact: Shippen’s first idea for the show was one character narrating entirely alone, but she added the therapist role specifically to turn that monologue into a two person dialogue.
6. The Amelia Project: Faking Your Death
Philip Thorne and Øystein Ulsberg Brager co-created The Amelia Project through their theater company Imploding Fictions, releasing the first episode in December 2017. The premise follows a secret organization that fakes the deaths of its clients so they can vanish and start new lives, run by an unnamed Interviewer voiced by Alan Burgon and his assistant Alvina, voiced by Julia C. Thorne. Thorne works from Paris and Brager from Oslo, splitting the writing and directing between them along with a rotating group of guest writers who each bring a new client’s story to life.
Each episode is told through one client’s confession to The Interviewer. The show has earned recognition among drama podcasts at the Audioverse Awards multiple years running, winning six awards in 2020 alone including Best Audio Play Production. Fun fact: Every client who visits The Amelia Project is offered a cup of cocoa during the consultation, a detail that has stayed in the show since its first season.
7. Passenger List: Vanished Flight Mystery
John Scott Dryden, a Peabody Award winner known for Tumanbay and LifeAfter, created Passenger List and brought in Lauren Shippen from The Bright Sessions and sound designer Mark Henry Phillips, whose credits include Homecoming and Serial. The story opens with Atlantic Flight 702 vanishing mid-flight between London and New York with 256 passengers aboard, and follows Kaitlin Le, played by Kelly Marie Tran, as she searches for her twin brother who disappeared with the plane.
It won a 2020 Webby People’s Voice Award, plus Gold for Best Fiction at the 2020 British Podcast Awards. There’s only 8 episodes in Season 1, so this show is perfect for a weekend binge. Fun fact: Passenger List launched a weekly email newsletter called The Investigation, letting listeners dig into Flight 702’s disappearance.
8. Midst: Space Western Saga
Three anonymous performers working under the name Third Person created Midst, releasing the first episode on January 7, 2020. The show is set on the planet Midst, in a settlement called Stationary Hill, and follows a cantankerous outlaw, a struggling cult follower and a scheming antagonist whose paths keep crossing. All three members of Third Person voice every character themselves, narrating in present tense.
Midst built its first two seasons, 19 episodes each, as a hobby project before Critical Role acquired the show in March 2023. The deal let Third Person work on the storytelling podcast full time, remastering the first two seasons with new sound and adding lightly animated video editions released on YouTube. Season three, produced full time through Critical Role’s Metapigeon studio, brought the show’s total to 57 episodes across three seasons. Fun fact: The same trio behind Midst also created an unrelated podcast called Blueberries Hill, a Beatrix Potter style storybook series aimed at children.
The best part about fiction podcasts is that a new world is always just an episode away. Add one of these shows to your listening routine, and you might find yourself looking forward to your commute or workout a little more. A great story has a way of making ordinary moments better.