gimlet — Bloggery — Touched with Fire Media

I’ve decided to start an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO, called “Podcast Rodeo”, in which I review podcasts I either do or don’t listen to. The reviews will be peripatetic and sometimes unusual; some of these shows are not things I feel like doing a breakdown on, so there will just be a little story, faintly inspired by the show or its hosts. Some might cover more than one show — at last count, I was subscribed to 43 podcasts, from NPR offerings like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me to obscurities like Scott Carrier’s Home of the Brave.

This first one, though, is pretty much gonna be a review, based on some thoughts I had while listening to Startup this afternoon, fighting the ever-worsening traffic of NE Portland as I attempted to return the cable box (that’s right, I’ve cut the cord — take that, Comcast). So, without further ado, some thoughts and ideas about Startup and its place in a world it helped create.

The Startup logo, replete with annoying capitalization.

Startup: What Is It?

Because I’m a podcast hipster, I feel the need to clarify that I’d been listening to podcasts for years before Alex Blumberg left his gig at the NPR show Planet Money (itself the first podcast spinoff of This American Life) to found a podcasting company. I think I first discovered podcasts during the 2008 presidential election, when Slate’s Political Gabfest was in its infancy (more on that at another juncture); Blumberg went solo sometime in 2014, and Startup first hit the internet airwaves that autumn, around the same time as Sarah Koenig’s Serial. Arm-in-arm, the two shows, both helmed by graduates of TAL, ushered in a podcast boom — people had been making podcasts for years and years, some of them quite good, but something about these two shows — and the plugs they received on the radio from This American Life, which aired both show’s pilots in its regular timeslot — woke a whole bunch of people up to just what was possible in audio if what you were doing wasn’t constricted by the FCC, the need to fill exactly an hour between Radiolab and Prairie Home Companion, or the pressures that go along with being officially associated with a stodgy enterprise like National Public Radio or Public Radio International.

Gimlet and Startup had one huge advantage: the core concept for Startup was completely ingenious. Blumberg decided that what he would do is document the very process of starting the company that would host the show, an act of meta-gonzo-journalism that gave that first season immediacy; Blumberg was doing something risky, possibly crazy, and recording himself doing it as he went. There were cringe-worthy moments as he gave disasterous rehearsal pitches to angel investors; there was genuine pathos as he and Gimlet cofounder Matt Leiber found themselves in the fraught territory that lies between friends and business partners (the first season’s most memorable episode featured Blumber and Leiber’s discomfiting negotiations about who would own how much of a burgeoning company that was still little more than a notion); there were late night conversations between Blumberg and his no-nonsense wife, public radio veteran Nazanin Rafsanjani; and, in the end, there was success — Startup was a runaway hit, and Gimlet rapidly became the gold standard in for-profit narrative audio. The first season of Startup was a memorable listening experience, a sprawling story of real risk and real reward, in which an everyman protagonist comes within inches of failure before succeeding. In the long run, though Serial was a bigger sensation, Startup was a better show.

Growing Pains

As Gimlet grew, Startup shut down for a while, as Blumberg started hiring people to do other shows (notably the great Reply All), looked for a cohost, and tried to find another company to profile. Last summer, it came back to peer behind the curtain with Dating Ring, a dating website that came out of famous startup accelerator Y-Combinator, which helped incubate Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twitch, among other companies. Blumberg had taken some steps to find a different flavor for the second season, including bringing in Planet Money vet Lisa Chow to cohost, and choosing a company that was owned and operated by young women rather than a pair of middle-aged dudes. Chow has been a welcome addition, more confident and less nebbishy than Blumberg, but also a little more traditional in her role as cohost — she’s never the star of the show, and doesn’t insert herself in the story nearly so daringly as Blumberg did in his first season.

And therein lies the problem that Startup has had ever since the end of its first season: without the daring conceit that the host himself was putting everything on the line for the very show you’re listening to, it loses a lot of its energy. Startup’s second season is perfectly competent, sometimes far more than that, and the Gimlet guys did a great job of finding real characters to star in it. But it’s not deeply urgent or compelling, not the way that first season was, when some episodes would be taken up largely by a sleepless Blumberg muttering semi-coherent panic thoughts into a microphone while his wife and children slept on the other side of a door. It’s great that the show made moves to include more female voices, but by picking people who were so young, with so much less to lose, and with so much less personal connection to the audience, it lost something.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the show’s best episodes since season 1 were the ones from the little “mini-season” that came out last fall, and which were a sort of status check on Gimlet itself. It pondered the uncomfortable question of the thin line between advertising and endorsement. It tackled head-on the company’s racial dynamics. And, hilariously, it used Chow’s maternity leave as a vehicle to get honest about what a shitshow the company can be.

And What Now?

This season, the show is clearly suffering from mission creep, at least if you ask me. It was clear that they couldn’t just go out and profile a nother fledgling company; they’d done that twice, and the second time through hadn’t been nearly as much fun as the first. Would they profile a failing company? They’ve been kicking that around, and keep mentioning it, but it hasn’t happened at all. Instead, the first two episodes have been a gimmicky, not-that-great profile of the streaming video company Twitch — the gimmick being that they don’t tell you it’s Twitch they’re profiling until the very end of the second episode, though if you’re a sharp listener who ever had reason to stream TV back in the late 2000s, you’ll have figured it out by the end of the first episode. This story lacked the immediacy of either of the first two seasons, because (A) it’s told entirely in the past tense, and (B) the main characters come off as fairly straightforward tech douches, who think that because they made a billion dollars, anybody in the world can. (Yeah, they all went to Yale and then Y Combinator. Not exactly just “anybody”.)

Now, Startup is promising to move on to other companies, possibly ones that haven’t fared so well, though I must admit that I’m a little skeptical. The show lost something real when Blumberg ceased to be its main character, and now seems to be casting about for reasons to exist. Maybe the problem, at least for me, is that I’m actually not that compelled by stories of businesses qua businesses — the word entrepreneur is an epithet in my household, and a lot of the people who would use the word for themselves tend to rub me the wrong way. I was on-board because I had an established relationship with Blumberg going back to his days hunting down his childhood babysitter on This American Life, and because the first season was such a high wire act that I was mostly curious about whether he — or anybody — could pull it off.

Ultimately, I think the problem is that Startup was a brilliant idea for a one-off show, but it is not evergreen at all. The reason Reply All (which bills itself as “a show about the internet”) can continue to churn out great content week after week is that its purview is so broad; “a show about the internet” can be about practically anything, because it’s actually about the people who use the internet, why, and how. Startup has to be about, well, startups. And though no two startups are the same, so far the show has failed to prove that they’re different enough to be interesting, either. Gimlet might do well to retire its flagship show, or only bring it back for the kind of self-reflexive status checks like last fall’s “mini-season”. Because what they’re doing now isn’t really working.