Feeling uncomfortable with the practice of placing "highlight reels" at the beginning of podcasts, I need to explain what a highlight reel is before discussing why it feels uncomfortable.
What is a Highlight Reel#
Most of us have seen movies, and the excitement of a movie trailer largely determines whether we will watch the film (the same applies to video game trailers). A movie trailer typically consists of key shots from the film; how can these shots be made interesting, exciting, and spoiler-free? The most common method is to disrupt the narrative rhythm.
A typical example is director Stanley Kubrick, who used a lot of descriptive text and a series of fragmented, reassembled shots in the trailers for "Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" and "A Clockwork Orange," condensed into a few minutes. This editing style, which differs from linear storytelling, is called "montage."
Trailers exist independently of the main film, serving as a promotional tool to attract viewers, whether they are entering a cinema or clicking on a video website. Before the main feature begins, there may be advertisements, but it won't be a trailer. Therefore, my discomfort with highlight reels in podcasts stems from the fact that trailers are inserted before the main content begins.
Why It Feels Uncomfortable#
Before discussing the specific reasons for my discomfort, I want to roughly speculate on why podcasts do this.
Programs with "highlight reels" are usually talk-based podcasts that explore viewpoints based on a theme, leading to conclusions or not. This is a process of thinking through speaking. Thinking can be experiential or emergent, but speaking needs to flow logically, which takes time; hence, a podcast episode lasting one or two hours is quite common.
As the publishers, we hope that listeners or a passerby surfing the internet will tune into this episode, but we also assume how listeners will face a segment of unknown information density that lasts for hours. So, just like editing a movie trailer, we take key, interesting, and exciting segments from the main content and edit them into a highlight reel, which serves as a preview for the podcast episode. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Nowadays, going online is no longer referred to as going online; instead, it involves picking up a phone and scrolling through something. Behind the waterfall of information is a recommendation algorithm that understands you well, and we refer to what we scroll through as "content." Setting aside traffic pushes, let’s assume a podcast episode has already captured the user's attention with its title and cover; the next step is to immediately provide useful "content" that makes users willing to pay their attention to this episode.
So, it’s fine for podcasts to have trailers, but treating the trailer format with a short video mindset makes me uncomfortable.
An Alternative Approach#
Podcasts naturally have a storytelling quality; the feeling after listening to an episode is similar to finishing a book, a movie, or an album. Having a highlight reel at the beginning of an episode disrupts this storytelling quality. Would a suspense movie reveal the true identity of the villain in the trailer?
Just as there are film materials specifically shot for trailers, my ideal podcast preview would be a brief introduction recorded specifically for the episode. In fact, many talk-based podcasts do this, not by extracting segments from the episode but by having the host provide additional commentary, with some footnotes appearing before the episode begins.
Designing the beginning of a podcast episode like those memorable openings in films or the Intro in music albums, rather than using a highlight reel like a short video, would make it truly a short video, suitable for separate release on video platforms.