The Pod Piper

SOMETHING NEW Al Jackson & Frank Caliendo Try To Be Serious is very much something the general population would conjure upon hearing the word podcast - dudes just shooting the breeze in a semi-structured way that isn’t actually all that structured. And the dudes are comedians. But the dudes are not both white. And, while rambly, they attempt to avoid riffing - as the title nods to. This break in comedy is refreshing, but the attempt to be serious falls a bit short of the mark. It’s not that I don’t want to listen to a podcast and laugh, it’s that the serious tenor of the conversations are a bit circular and unproductive in generating compelling discourse. Like most people (I imagine), to me Caliendo scans as the guy that does some bang up celebrity impressions from a couple years back. He had completely fallen off my radar until this show popped up when browsing the new shows on my podcast app a couple months ago. I was intrigued by the title, as my one word identifier...

SOMETHING NEW With a larger than life premise, attempting to both trace the modern condition of human existence back to its roots and prescribe some kind of solution for what ails us, WNYC podcast The Stakes sets a pretty high bar for itself right out of the gate. And so far, sad to say, I think it's a little overblown. The episodes have all tackled important issues and the reporting on each has been exceptional. But I am left wanting a throughline that really isn’t there, to connect the topics in a more cogent way than a “how did our crazy world get so crazy?” kind of broad introspection. Part of this is the frequency of the episodes, dropping once every two weeks. Yet the question that persists is one of theme - other than being problems, what do lead-based paint, Eric Holder Jr., giving birth while black, conscious rap, and a gender-fluid pansexual have in common? Injustice? It just doesn’t do much for me as a sum of parts. That stipulated, individual chunks have th...