However, as a listener with a critical ear, the only true-crime podcasts worth their salt are the ones which turn that maxim on its head, spending all their time in the morass of the legal system and taking a distinctly human approach to their subjects. And, for my money, there are few shows that have better exemplified this than Empire On Blood, the 2018 podcast chronicling inmate Calvin Buari’s yearslong quest to have his life sentence for a double homicide overturned. What follows is at times moving, maddening, unbelievable, and frequently undeniably entertaining. For all of those reasons and more, Empire On Blood is hereby inducted into the Podcast Canon.
Reported by prolific journalist turned podcaster Steve Fishman, the program follows Fishman’s more than six-year-long relationship with incarcerated former drug dealer Calvin Buari as he seeks to clear his name for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Buari’s story is an incredible one as well, starting out as a teenage drug kingpin in the Bronx and evolving into a sagacious crusader across his 20-plus years in prison. The pair connected initially as Buari sought a journalist to help raise the profile of his cause, but over the years an actual friendship between the two blossomed.
The show is built around Fishman’s recordings for what he had originally intended to be a print piece. This is an important detail. As the show did not begin life as a podcast, there is a rawness to the audio that only adds to the show’s appeal. Far from the polish of a Zoom recorder and a soundproof studio, these are desperation recordings, taped for transcription first and foremost. Normally this would irk me, but there’s something incredibly honest about them. Subjects are less aware of the recorder, entirely unguarded. Interviews are conducted in bars, restaurants, on boats, in offices, and of course, from prison payphones as well. The ambient noise of these scenarios feels chaotic at times, antithetical to the usual practice of the trained podcast producer, but it helps in elaborating and translating the mess at the series’ heart.
That the 100-plus hours of tape Fishman collected across six years of reporting have been assembled into such a compelling narrative is surely due to the expert work of the show’s producers, Mia Lobel and Emile Klein, and story editor Julia Barton. Listeners are seamlessly buffeted along a coherent tale that, upon closer examination, is woven from moments that may have occurred years apart from one another. Fishman’s present-tense narration helps to elide these leaps, but it’s masterful work on Barton’s part in structuring the events such that they help to build tension for the listener and deliver a more tightly plotted story arc.
Like S-Town if it had been written by Elmore Leonard, Empire On Blood is a propulsive trip across the New York legal system, larded with incredibly colorful personalities and a truly twisty narrative. From the jazz-singing lawyer who helped free Hurricane Carter, to the turtle-obsessed prosecutor with an iron-clad reputation, or the mink-wearing crack dealer reputed to practice black magic, and the gun-toting, god-fearing private investigator with a penchant for enjoying copious amounts of wine.
The show brims over with a pulpy sense of fun thanks to Fishman’s gimlet eye for observation. No detail is too minor for him to fixate on and amplify its uncanniness. But, even more, it comes down to Fishman’s streetwise, hard-boiled narration style. A show’s narration can be one of the biggest barriers to entry for many listeners: too often the host isn’t well-versed enough in the necessity of ingesting the words from the script before recording their tracking. This leads to leaden deliveries without any subtlety, authenticity, or panache, like the listener is a child who needs every detail plainly explicated. Fishman, on the other hand, spins the yarn of the podcast with a startling ease, his delivery sings. Whether on account of his rough-around-the-edges East coast accent, or his Sam Spade world-weariness, Fishman is a natural at narration. He explores a vibrant, dynamic range of emotions, cadences, and timbres across the series.
What really engages the listener is that Empire On Blood’s story isn’t a clear-cut case of right and wrong. There is a sense that everyone in the story is using one another for their own ends, coloring the entire affair a decidedly immoral shade of gray. Fishman’s aim is to tell a compelling story, whatever the implication it may have on his subjects isn’t entirely his concern. Whereas, for Buari, and Dwight Robinson—another inmate with positively Shakespearean ties to Buari—Fishman is a means to an end, a lifeline to the outside and a friend through tough times, but also a stepping stone on their paths towards clemency.
Fishman, along with actor and filmmaker Fisher Stevens, went on to found Orbit Media where he has continued leaning into true crime programming. In fact, Empire On Blood was originally a Panoply production and hadn’t been widely available for a number of years since its initial release before Fishman rescued it and, in 2024 re-released it under the aegis of his own studio. It now lives (somewhat confusingly) on the feed for another Orbit Media property, The Burden. It’s one of those tactics that feels indicative of where podcasting finds itself in 2026, a popular podcast decides to retroactively become an anthology series in order to capture the initially engaged audience on its RSS feed, but in doing so this singular production isn’t allowed to stand out on its own. Instead it’s confusingly buried as the second season of another podcast. I’m glad that more people have the chance to discover it anew, it just feels like one more way that the persistent churn of the industry leads superlative works to be subsumed in the ever-deepening chasm of the medium.
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