Behind the Bastards

Robert Evans has a gift for making you simultaneously laugh and recoil. Behind the Bastards profiles history's most terrible people — dictators, cult leaders, con artists, corporate villains — and does it with the kind of dark humor that somehow makes the subject matter bearable. Evans, a conflict journalist by trade, brings real on-the-ground reporting instincts to his research, and you can hear it in the depth of his sourcing. The format pairs Evans with a rotating cast of comedian guests who react in real time as he drops increasingly absurd facts about whichever monster he's profiling that week. It works because the guests aren't just laughing along — they're genuinely horrified, and that tension between comedy and genuine moral outrage keeps every episode gripping. Some two-parters on figures like Steven Seagal or the Koch brothers run well over two hours, and you won't notice the time passing. With over 1,100 episodes and a 4.4-star rating from more than 15,000 reviews, the show has built one of the most devoted audiences in podcasting. It expanded to Netflix in video format, which says something about how well the concept translates. Evans doesn't just read Wikipedia entries — he pulls from obscure biographies, declassified documents, and first-person accounts that give you details you genuinely won't find anywhere else. Fair warning: once you start a multi-part series on someone like Saddam Hussein's novelist career, you're not going to bed on time.