Feeling uncomfortable with the practice of placing "highlight reels" at the beginning of podcasts, it is necessary to first explain what a highlight reel is before discussing why it feels uncomfortable.
What is a Highlight Reel#
Most of us have watched movies, and the excitement of a movie trailer largely determines whether we will watch the film (the same goes for video game trailers). A movie trailer typically consists of key shots from the film; how can these shots be made interesting, exciting, and not spoil the plot? The most common method is to disrupt the narrative rhythm.
A typical example is director Stanley Kubrick, who used a lot of descriptive text in the trailers for "Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" and "A Clockwork Orange," where a series of fragmented and reassembled shots are condensed into a few minutes of footage. This editing style, which differs from linear storytelling, is called "montage."
Trailers exist independently of the main film, and their purpose is to attract viewers as a promotional tool, whether in a cinema or when 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 this discomfort, I would like to crudely speculate on why podcasts do this.
Programs with "highlight reels" are usually conversational podcasts that diverge from the topic to draw conclusions or not. This is a process of thinking through speaking. Thinking can be experiential or emergent, but speaking needs to be coherent, which takes time, so it's common for a podcast episode to last one or two hours.
As the publisher, we hope that listeners or a passerby surfing the internet can listen to this episode, but we also anticipate 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 reassemble them in post-production; this serves as a preview for the podcast episode. There is nothing wrong with that.
Nowadays, going online is no longer called going online; instead, the behavior has become picking up a phone to scroll through something. Behind the waterfall and information streams is a recommendation algorithm that understands you well, and we refer to what we scroll through as "content." Setting aside traffic pushing, 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, having a trailer for a podcast is fine, but treating the trailer format with the mindset of short videos makes me uncomfortable.
An Alternative Approach#
Podcasts naturally have a storytelling feel, and the experience of finishing a podcast episode is similar to finishing a book, a movie, or an album. Having a highlight reel at the beginning of an episode breaks this storytelling feel. 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 conversational podcasts do this; they do not extract segments from the episode but rather provide supplementary comments from the host, with some footnotes appearing before the episode begins.
Designing the beginning of a podcast episode like those memorable openings in films or the intros in music albums would be ideal, while highlight reels resembling short videos make it truly a short video, which could be released separately on video platforms.