Best Served Cold

Best Served Cold is an Australian true crime podcast led by co-hosts Tama J and Laura Elise, and its own intro sums up the setup: two people drinking wine and talking about crime. That same intro calls it formerly Egypt's 36th most popular true crime podcast. Elsewhere the pair declare it the best true crime podcast as voted by you, then admit the vote amounts to manifesting. The self-mockery is part of the appeal. Every title in view pairs two subjects with an ampersand, and the run of them shows how wide the net goes. There are cases such as The Murder of Maree Collins, The Disappearance of Brandon Swanson and Death of Conrad Roy, next to names like Barbora Skrlová, Boris Korneev and Mary Reeser. Then there is material a stricter crime show would leave out. No Man's Sky, a video game, gets two episodes: The Fall of No Man's Sky and The Return of No Man's Sky. Tama J calls the story a global phenomenon and starts with Hello Games, the British studio in Guildford, Surrey, founded by Sean Murray and Grant Duncan. The return episode lists what arrived later, from free VR support to NPC overhauls and rideable animals, and ends up calling the studio a beacon of light in the gaming industry. Fyre Festival shares an episode with the troubled teen industry, and the talk covers a Netflix documentary by Chris Smith and how the festival became shorthand for badly prepared events. The 'Pimp My Ride' episode asks how much of reality TV is scripted, and looks at people from the show who later described what had really happened. Detours happen inside detours. That episode stops for memories of Blockbuster and Video Easy before the host shelves it as a tangent for another time. The case narration is more careful than the banter around it. In the Maree Collins segment, the story moves through new keys, unanswered calls, a ham in the oven and text messages, each pinned to a clock time. The openings are the opposite. Greetings fall apart, one episode starts with a burp, and a new intro gets presented as the same mess and general shenanigans as before. One episode welcomes newcomers who found the show through an accidental viral moment on TikTok, and the hosts also point people to YouTube and social media. Sign-offs drift into running bits, including code words such as cheese and ghost fire. Swearing runs through all of it, and one host tells newcomers at the start that anyone who dislikes it probably won't enjoy the show.