Show Notes
- The spin-off of You Must Remember This, in which a collection of writers and reporters curated by Karina Longworth produce stories on Hollywood history in the style of the podcast, is set to debut on January 21. I first flagged this project in my recent Q&A with Longworth for Vulture.
- Dylan Marron’s Conversations with People Who Hate Me returns on January 27.
- Fans of Sean Rameswaram and This American Life would probably get some mileage out of Today, Explained’s stylistic approach to the impeachment story, titled “Impeachment TV: Mr. Sondland Goes to Washington” — or, alternatively, “This Ukrainian Life.”
- The cover art for The Dream’s upcoming sophomore season is pretty sick.
- The fine folks of Forever35 is bringing a new podcast into the world: Gee Thanks, Just Bought It with Caroline Moss. More on this next week.
This Week in Public Media…
- Jan Schaffer, ombudsperson of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, pens a post asking: “Should We Disrupt Public Media to Create More Local News?” This is probably a good time to re-up my deranged scribbles from June sketching out a technological inversion of NPR.
- WBUR welcomes a new CEO and GM: Margaret Low, formerly of The Atlantic, who succeeds Charlie Kravetz in the role. Here’s the announcement post.
Elsewhere… The Third Coast Festival announced a new executive director last week: Shirley Alfaro.
In Court… The US Supreme Court has announced that it will not hear an appeal from Adnan Syed, the focus of Serial’s first season. He remains in prison serving a life sentence.
Uncle Fun: HBO’s adaptation/remixing/sequel of Watchmen is melting my brain, and I’m masochistically glad for the additional brain-melting provided by the official podcast that the premium cable network is being published off on the side. Featuring showrunner Damon Lindelof in conversation with Craig Mazin — he of Scriptnotes fame, but also of the other recent official HBO podcast that recaps the show he created, Chernobyl — the pod is satisfying recap stuff, giving me the same highs I used to get listening to Vince Gilligan on the Breaking Bad Insider podcast back when that show was still on its run. (Man, it’s been a long time.)
Anyway, it’s just a meta-recap podcast, meaning that it’s not part of the whole supplementary in-universe material gimmick that the show has also been publishing, which would have been cool.
Grandpa Grumps: Because it’s Thanksgiving week, I’ll double-up on the positives. Been really enjoying the latest 30 for 30 Podcast season, which has been relentlessly compelling.