‘When We All Get to Heaven’

In 1993, more than a decade into the AIDS epidemic, the LGBTQ-friendly Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco had to navigate the intersection of sexuality and faith amid an existential crisis. This podcast dives deep into the story with an archive of 1,200 cassette recordings of the church’s services at the epidemic’s heights—recorded at the time so ailing members could listen at home. As congregants died and mourned, the community united to care for the group’s spiritual and physical health and, instead of shying away from what was still a taboo topic, identified as a “church with AIDS.”

Where to Listen: YouTube
Explore More at Peabody’s Website: When We All Get To Heaven

‘Divine Intervention’

Divine Intervention chronicles a group of Catholic priests and nuns who dedicated themselves to not just protesting the Vietnam War, but boldly flouting the law to undermine the war effort, including harboring draft resistors, breaking into draft offices, and clashing with the FBI, all of which culminated in significant trials in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Additionally, the series weaves in a personal love story about a priest who left the church to marry an anti-war activist, revealing the origins of the podcast’s host, Brendan Patrick Hughes, while capturing the spirit of the Boston Irish and the era’s intense political struggles.

Where to Listen: Apple Podcasts
Explore More at Peabody’s Website: Divine Intervention

How It Happened: The Stunning New Queer Podcast When We All Get to Heaven

Podcast co-creator and religious historian Lynne Gerber told the San Francisco Bay Times that When We All Get to Heaven documents “a community that knew how to face loss and make hope in hard times … something all of us are going to need to learn how to do if we’re going to get through the existential crises in front of us” in 2026.

Where to Read: San Francisco Bay Times

FROM OUR FRIENDS

Lynne Gerber’s Peabody Acceptance for ‘When We All Get to Heaven’

“These are stories of a people living through a terrible, terrifying time, with no end in sight,” Gerber said. “They are a study in how to hold collective grief, claim joy, and keep showing up even when the path is unclear and the outcome uncertain. We are such a people living through such a time, and we have a lot to learn from these voices.”

Where to Watch: PeabodyAwards.com

Brendan Patrick Hughes’s Peabody Acceptance for ‘Divine Intervention’

“Our story is about nuns and priests in 1970s Boston who became cat burglars in order to sabotage the Vietnam War,” he said. “And they got so good at it that they began trading blows with J. Edgar Hoover. They scaled walls, they picked locks, they stole draft files. They sang songs from the witness stand in protest.”

Where to Watch: PeabodyAwards.com

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‘Adolescence’

In this gripping limited series, 13-year-old Jamie Miller (an astonishing Owen Cooper) is arrested for murdering a female classmate. What’s revolutionary is that this isn’t a crime mystery; instead, the storytelling focuses on the ways that the crime affects the investigators and his family while also revealing the online “manosphere” sources that made such an act inevitable. With an intensity that’s heightened by the series’ high-wire act of production—each episode is a single take—Adolescence provides no scapegoats or easy answers. (More on that below from co-creators Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne.)

Where to Watch: Netflix
Explore More on Peabody’s Website: Adolescence

‘Audrie & Daisy’

This 2016 documentary delves into the stories of two teenage girls who were raped in separate incidents, one in California and one in Missouri, both of whom endured cyberbullying after the assaults. Using social media and court documents, the husband-and-wife directing team of Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk tell these two related, tragic stories, which begin with the girls’ assaults being caught on camera and end in destruction, anguish, and suicide. A difficult watch with a crucial message.

Where to Watch: Netflix
Explore More on Peabody’s Website: Audrie & Daisy

‘Feminist Frequency’

Feminist Frequency was created by Anita Sarkeesian in 2009 as a video series exploring gender issues in pop culture, including video games, and it became a flashpoint in the #Gamergate online harassment campaign of the mid-2010s. Sarkeesian endured death and rape threats and doxxing all due to her “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games” series. Feminist Frequency carried on, however, and continues now as a video podcast hosted by Kat Spada, exploring works such as Hairspray, Barbarella, and the most recent Oscar nominees.

Where to Watch: YouTube
Explore More on Peabody’s Website: Feminist Frequency

‘The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram’

In this documentary, Frontline and ProPublica investigate an online network of white supremacists dubbed “Terrorgram” because it spreads extremism and violence through loosely moderated platforms like Telegram. The work reveals how the group not only disseminated propaganda but actively recruited and groomed young individuals for acts of violence, growing from a few accounts to a large community focused on far-right terror. By analyzing chat logs and conducting interviews, the report highlights how various platforms have fostered extremist ideologies and the eventual arrests of individuals linked to the Terrorgram collective.

Where to Watch: PBS
Explore More on Peabody’s Website: The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram

‘Adolescence’ on ‘We Disrupt This Broadcast’

“It takes a village to raise a child,” co-creator and star Stephen Graham said on The Peabody Awards and Center for Media & Social Impact podcast, “We Disrupt This Broadcast”. “And [co-creator] Jack [Thorne] said to me, ‘Yeah, but it also takes a village to destroy a child.’ And that was kind of what we based our whole thing on. We weren’t pointing the finger at anybody. We were just saying maybe we’re all accountable in some way, shape, or form.”

Listen to the Podcast Episode: PeabodyAwards.com

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On Immigration

When President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown began, PBS News Hour did what it does best, sending reporters to the scenes where news was happening, from raids to protests to press conferences. The organization’s ongoing coverage, Immigration Crackdown, also included deeper dives into the history of immigration policy in the United States and scrupulously documented the views of not only immigrants under scrutiny, but also the Trump administration and its supporters. Meanwhile, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution took an interactive approach to its local Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps, bringing viewers inside the operations through affectingly intimate social video and body-cam footage. The assembled series, ICE Sweeps Georgia, was viewed 2.8 million times—coincidentally, the same year the paper published its final print edition after 157 years. And finally, in HBO Max’s Critical Incident: Death at the Border, we learn about wrongdoing inside the U.S. Border Patrol, starting with the in-custody death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas and exposing a wider culture of violence and impunity within the agency. Through shocking eyewitness footage and leaked internal documents, the film reveals the presence of secret teams created to shield agents from accountability, leading to multiple congressional investigations and underscoring the pressing need for oversight and reform in this influential law enforcement body.

Explore More on Peabody’s Website: Immigration Crackdown, ICE Sweeps Georgia and Critical Incident: Death at the Border

On Incarceration

In “The Strike,” PBS’s Independent Lens documents a 2013 hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners against solitary confinement in the super-max prison Pelican Bay. The film spotlights the strikers’ personal stories and, through interviews with incarcerated people and prison officials, looks at the effects of solitary confinement. HBO Documentary Films focused on a broader pattern of abuse in The Alabama Solution, which came about when, In 2019, filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman visited an Alabama prison for a sanctioned filming of a religious revival, but inmates off-camera revealed the brutal conditions and corruption they faced daily. Over the following years, incarcerated men risked their lives to provide Jarecki and Kaufman with stealth video recordings of the dire realities in Alabama prisons—ranging from drug overdoses and beatings to suicides—ultimately leading to legislative hearings aimed at reforming these conditions.

Explore More on Peabody’s Website: The Strike and The Alabama Solution

On Natural Disaster

The National Geographic documentary series Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time from 2025 takes a retrospective look at the disaster, focusing on the experiences of Black communities in New Orleans during and after the storm, prioritizing personal stories over sensationalized media portrayals. It sheds light on systemic inequalities and government failures, illustrating how the storm worsened existing social injustices while offering local voices a platform to reclaim their narratives and share their resilience, grief, and wisdom for future generations.

Explore More on Peabody’s Website: Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time

On Policing

Plans to improve the relationship between the police and the Black community in Louisville, Kentucky, collapsed with the fatal 2020 shooting of Breonna Taylor in her home, which became a national flashpoint. Louisville Public Media investigated what went wrong in 2021, during season 2 of its podcast Dig. Three years later, ABC15 Arizona produced a 32-part investigative project, “Policing Phoenix,” to break down a U.S. Department of Justice report—itself a product of the news station’s previous reporting—that showed systemic discrimination, excess use of force, and civil rights violations by the city’s police department.

Explore More on Peabody’s Website: Dig:The Model City and Policing Phoenix

Andrew Jarecki’s Peabody Acceptance for ‘The Alabama Solution’

“The truth is that the condition of people in prison in the United States is worse than you can imagine, and we don’t hear about it. The reason we don’t hear about it is that, even though we lock up more of our citizens than any democratic country at a cost of $116 billion a year, journalists like us, and many people in this room, are routinely denied access to U.S. prisons. So those of you who’ve been able to see The Alabama Solution were able to see inside because incredibly brave incarcerated men risked their lives, risked everything, risked bodily harm, to help us.”

Where to Watch: PeabodyAwards.com

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‘The Rehearsal’ Season 2 Trailer

Dive Deeper

Starred Review: Alienating, awkward, anxiety-inducing: why ‘The Rehearsal’ is TV’s most fascinating show

“What do couples counseling, a reality-singing competition, three cloned Yorkies, the content moderation of Paramount+ Germany and aviation safety all have in common?” Adrian Horton writes for The Guardian. “Virtually nothing, except the interest of television mastermind Nathan Fielder, who braids such disparate concepts together in the galaxy-brained second season of The Rehearsal.”

Where to Read: The Guardian

Further Listening: What It Was Like to Win ‘Wings of Voice’ on Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’

Decoding TV interviews Isabella Henao, who won Wings of Voice, the singing competition within The Rehearsal season 2, offering interesting insider perspective on one of the series’ many interrelated layers of “reality.” “Never once were we made a joke of,” Henao says, noting that there were several legitimate rounds of competition, performances, and meticulous costume fittings. “Even on the show, Wings of Voice wasn’t a joke.”

Where to Listen: YouTube

Further Viewing: ‘Nathan for You’

In this progenitor to The Rehearsal, which ran from 2013 to 2017, Fielder advises small businesses, suggesting outrageous solutions in a parody of management consultants and aggressive consumer advocacy segments on local news. As in The Rehearsal, some of the humor derives from Fielder’s deadpan awkwardness and his subjects’ willingness to go along with almost anything on camera. His escapades include trying to boost the popularity of a petting zoo by making one of its pigs into a (real) celebrity, opening a (totally real) coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, and launching a winter clothing brand called Summit Ice dedicated to Holocaust education. (The latter shows up as the subject of a season 2 Rehearsal episode after its removal from Paramount+ in Germany.)

Where to Watch: HBO Max

Fielder’s Peabody Conversation about ‘The Rehearsal’

“Sometimes when you create an environment that’s fake but it feels identical to a real space, I’ve experienced it at times where I’ll actually forget that I’m in the fake environment … That mix of something feeling real but also knowing it’s safe because it’s not maybe allows you to explore different parts of yourself that you wouldn’t.”

Where to Watch: PeabodyAwards.com

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