April 2, 2019
(The following review coincidentally precedes the NCAA Men’s Final Four, the college basketball tournament which this year counts Auburn among the last quartet of standing teams, set to take place this weekend)
SOMETHING NEW
SOMETHING NEW
Mo Rocca is an enigmatic media personality, someone with a singular witty snark not often found in someone who works for a major news network. He comes off as very well informed and put together while also conveying this kind of eternal sardonic aloofness of a teenager with an old soul, all of which makes for a CV full of enviable roles and positions. To name but a few, Rocca has been or is currently: a panelist on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, a correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning and The Daily Show, Vice Principal Panch in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway, a runner-up on Celebrity Jeopardy!, a moderator of the National Geographic Bee, a Daytime Emmy nominee for his work on Innovation Nation, and the host of My Grandmother's Ravioli on the Cooking Channel. Frankly it’s a little surprising that it took so long into a prolific career for the man to helm his own podcast, but the time is now and the show is Mobituaries.
As the name implies, this podcast is about the remembrances people leave behind after death. This is not, however, simply the retiring of human life. While some episodes take more of a biographical approach to documenting the hallmarks of an individual’s time on earth, Mobituaries is more generally concerned with our collective ability to distort something after it ceases to be. With each episode, Mo presents an alternative take that may breathe color into legacies that have begun to fade and morph over time. This project plays well on Rocca’s strengths, taking a serious journalistic approach and pairing it with his trademark quirky humor. For all his varied work I’m mostly familiar with the man’s recurring role on the Wait Wait panel, so it was fun to see Rocca work in a longer form medium with a more fluid narrative structure.
The list of subjects of the first season is a nod to the degree of innovation that sets this work apart from a more programmatic History Channel approach. Some of these folks were very highly regarded at the height of their popularity and still bare a high degree of name recognition in the present, while others contain characters with compelling stories far from the gaze of public recognition. The installments featuring stars Audrey Hepburn and Sammy Davis Jr. are wonderful meditations that A&E would be lucky to run, endowed with the verve and editorial musings of a talented comedic journalist. To quote the summary text of the show’s season 1 trailer, “Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter…until now.” Still, the more novel episodes are the more inventive takes via a theme - such as “Sitcom Deaths and Disappearances” or “The Forgotten Forerunners.” Not only do these episodes open up a reflective conversation on some implicitly unquestioned bit of cultural history - reminiscent of Decoder Ring - but they ruminate on what it means to leave behind a legacy.
“Death of a Tree: Roots of a Rivalry” diverges most widely from the mold, such as it is. The episode channels the combination of topics most likely to find an audience in the world of podcasts - sports and true crime - and weaves a tale that is so frustratingly American one can’t help but marvel at its existence. (Can it really get much more patriotic than football, crime, and a deeply misguided sense of a rallying around a common cause?) The episode follows the deep seated rivalry between two southern universities, Auburn and Alabama, and a crime that engenders even more lunacy than one might expect from the sort of irrational hatred beget from college sports rivalries. At one point Rocca mentions how he is being sucked in by the character at the heart of this story, Harvey Updyke, and reminds himself that impartiality is more important in a true-crime story. It’s a poignant thought, kind of what the whole series hinges upon: that the subjectivity of memory can be as fickle when active as it is when it slips passively into place via years of neglect.
Our memories have the power to implicitly exploit something after it comes safely to a stop while we journey forward. It’s not just the sense of of kinship Rocca admits to feeling for Updyke, unfolding in the not-too-distant past, but also the towering admiration for figures in the Auburn/Alabama rivalry like Bear Bryant or the trees on the Auburn campus. The lives that perish from this earth are rooted in an inexorably static state while the realm of the living spirals frantically onward. We repurpose things out of laziness and remember details not as they were but as they might’ve been. It’s not always malicious, and in fact it isn’t usually even something we return to at all unless prompted. That’s the genius of Mobituaries, really. Taken individually, any one of these episodes stands with the best of podcast storytelling. But collectively the show acts as a playful push for listeners to reexamine their relationship to memory and the legacies that implicitly form and cement over time.
As the name implies, this podcast is about the remembrances people leave behind after death. This is not, however, simply the retiring of human life. While some episodes take more of a biographical approach to documenting the hallmarks of an individual’s time on earth, Mobituaries is more generally concerned with our collective ability to distort something after it ceases to be. With each episode, Mo presents an alternative take that may breathe color into legacies that have begun to fade and morph over time. This project plays well on Rocca’s strengths, taking a serious journalistic approach and pairing it with his trademark quirky humor. For all his varied work I’m mostly familiar with the man’s recurring role on the Wait Wait panel, so it was fun to see Rocca work in a longer form medium with a more fluid narrative structure.
The list of subjects of the first season is a nod to the degree of innovation that sets this work apart from a more programmatic History Channel approach. Some of these folks were very highly regarded at the height of their popularity and still bare a high degree of name recognition in the present, while others contain characters with compelling stories far from the gaze of public recognition. The installments featuring stars Audrey Hepburn and Sammy Davis Jr. are wonderful meditations that A&E would be lucky to run, endowed with the verve and editorial musings of a talented comedic journalist. To quote the summary text of the show’s season 1 trailer, “Even if you know the names, you’ve never understood why they matter…until now.” Still, the more novel episodes are the more inventive takes via a theme - such as “Sitcom Deaths and Disappearances” or “The Forgotten Forerunners.” Not only do these episodes open up a reflective conversation on some implicitly unquestioned bit of cultural history - reminiscent of Decoder Ring - but they ruminate on what it means to leave behind a legacy.
“Death of a Tree: Roots of a Rivalry” diverges most widely from the mold, such as it is. The episode channels the combination of topics most likely to find an audience in the world of podcasts - sports and true crime - and weaves a tale that is so frustratingly American one can’t help but marvel at its existence. (Can it really get much more patriotic than football, crime, and a deeply misguided sense of a rallying around a common cause?) The episode follows the deep seated rivalry between two southern universities, Auburn and Alabama, and a crime that engenders even more lunacy than one might expect from the sort of irrational hatred beget from college sports rivalries. At one point Rocca mentions how he is being sucked in by the character at the heart of this story, Harvey Updyke, and reminds himself that impartiality is more important in a true-crime story. It’s a poignant thought, kind of what the whole series hinges upon: that the subjectivity of memory can be as fickle when active as it is when it slips passively into place via years of neglect.
Our memories have the power to implicitly exploit something after it comes safely to a stop while we journey forward. It’s not just the sense of of kinship Rocca admits to feeling for Updyke, unfolding in the not-too-distant past, but also the towering admiration for figures in the Auburn/Alabama rivalry like Bear Bryant or the trees on the Auburn campus. The lives that perish from this earth are rooted in an inexorably static state while the realm of the living spirals frantically onward. We repurpose things out of laziness and remember details not as they were but as they might’ve been. It’s not always malicious, and in fact it isn’t usually even something we return to at all unless prompted. That’s the genius of Mobituaries, really. Taken individually, any one of these episodes stands with the best of podcast storytelling. But collectively the show acts as a playful push for listeners to reexamine their relationship to memory and the legacies that implicitly form and cement over time.
From: Standalone
Recommended for: Those who have a bone to pick with the dead...or at least those who try to put the dead in a box (not specifically morticians, but also, probably, morticians would enjoy this show)
Drop Schedule: Thursday, Seasonal:Weekly (all episodes available now)
Average episode length: 45 minutes
Rating: Gotta Have It
THE LIST
The complex relationship between immigration and assimilation, as told through the lens of public shame in Switzerland. I was challenged to think about the movement of people around the world, across borders, and betwixt cultures in a new way.
If you are a fan of college football, tune in. If you are a fan of true-crime, tune-in. If you are a reader who usually skims Something New, go back and read it for a more complete picture of this episode, if desired, and then tune in.
This collaboration with new NPR podcast Throughline is all about planned obsolescence, when a company designs a product to fail faster. It incorporates a fictional story tied quite closely to a crazy nonfictional history, an excellent omnipresent soundtrack ala The Terminator, and a realization that we are all living in the world described herein.
HONORABLE MENTION
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