Over the last decade podcasting truly exploded, to the point where both the product and process of creating one have become low-hanging fruit for satirization. And to be fair, I get it; from the ubiquity of Blue Apron and Casper Mattress sponsorship ads — often delivered in uncomfortably hushed tones in the midst of true crime podcasts — to the near-uniform cadence of hosts’ storytelling, a natural extension of “NPR voice” ( a tone that, full disclosure, I tried so hard to master during my few years in public radio), the maturation of the medium over 2010-2019 provided a lot of fodder.
“Portlandia” skewered the medium in season 8, seemingly every finance bro entertains the idea of shouting into an iPhone speaker and uploading the result to SoundCloud, and, as one Twitter user put it, “When a group of men disappoint you that’s called a podcast.”
But all kidding aside, in this flooded market, there have obviously been absolute strokes of genius, storytellers…
