Secret Societies

Secret Societies is a Parcast feed, and the episodes considered here work less like one series than like a shop window for the network. Each entry borrows another show. Most start with a brief pitch from a Parcast voice or the incoming host, play a stretch of that series, and stop on an unresolved beat with a nudge to follow the full production. In practice, this is a quick way to hear how very different shows sound before committing to one. The espionage entries sit closest to the name on the door. Conspiracy Theories: CIA Edition, introduced by Carter Roy, takes up a Hungarian cardinal arrested on charges of treason and conspiracy, whose monotone confession to outlandish crimes caught the attention of American intelligence. Had the Soviets brainwashed him? By its close, the preview has moved on to the agency's search for a chemist willing to break boundaries, and it cuts off there. Impostors comes at secrecy from the other side. Investigative journalist Alex French met Wayne Simmons at his place in Annapolis, Maryland, in early 2016, while Simmons was under house arrest. Simmons says he spent 27 years undercover for the CIA. Plenty of people say he was never in the agency at all, and Simmons answers that the government is the one lying. French says the project is about espionage and 'how power operates in secret', which puts it closest in spirit to the feed's title. Crime and scandal fill the middle ground. Ashley Flowers's International Infamy sets out to tie each case to the place where it happened, and its sample follows a string of killings of elderly people living alone in Mexico, with eyewitnesses recalling a woman in a nurse's outfit near the scenes. Police eventually announced a hunt for a serial killer, which the episode calls the first such investigation in Mexican history. Hollywood Scandals, pitched around the 93rd Academy Awards, goes back to Edison's drive to control film equipment, the 1908 Motion Picture Patents Company, and the fires on sets and damaged cameras that came out of the rivalry. At the looser end, the hosts of Internet Urban Legends, one billed as the evidence expert and the other as the skeptic, bicker over a man who rented the Watcher House and would not say a word about it. Obsessed hands the microphone to comedians Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone, who riff on pop culture, including being left on seen by Ariana. A listener drawn in by the title should start with the two CIA episodes. One who came for crime should go straight to International Infamy.