| I threw my back out watching Bottoms over the weekend. How’s your aging going? This week, updates to our ongoing Best Podcasts of 2023 (So Far) list, plus a few listening notes. Let’s get to it. |
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 |  | | Photo: Murder on Sex Island Podcast |
| It’s an audiobook. It’s a podcast. It’s a combination audiobook-podcast. Well, kinda. Sorta. Murder on Sex Island is a murder-mystery novel that Jo Firestone, a comedian and host of Dr. Gameshow, wrote over the past few months while, shall we say, in between jobs. The book itself will be published online in the near future, but right now, Firestone has distributed a read-aloud version in the form of a weekly podcast — and it’s great. Murder on Sex Island follows a divorced ex–social worker who’s trying to lead a double life as a glamorous private investigator as she’s contracted by a hit reality show called Sex Island to solve a murder of one of its cast members. The catch? She has to solve the case while appearing on the show, because the fate of the deceased cast member has been hidden from the public to prevent the production from shutting down. Hilarious in a “so smart at being dumb that it’s brilliant” kind of way, Murder on Sex Island is the bloodstained love letter to reality-dating television I’ve wanted for years. |
 |  | | Photo: NPR |
| An impassioned question animates Fabi Reyna’s series revisiting the history of the Riot Grrrl movement: Where’s my place in the revolution? Typified by bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, the subculture left a lasting mark for its advancement of feminism via punk rock. But it was also the product of a specific time and place — the Pacific Northwest of the early ’90s. As a result, the predominant faces embodying Riot Grrrl ended up mostly being white. In six brisk episodes, Reyna grapples with the people who were drawn to the movement but felt pushed to the margins at the time, and examines how Riot Grrrl’s complicated legacy continues to shape bands, both within and beyond the United States, to this day. |
| ➽ Am I surprised that Strike Force Five is currently topping both Apple and Spotify’s podcast charts? Of course not. As much as the late night show format is on a secular decline, there remains plenty of juice in the combined capital of those five white dudes. The show’s not for me — I can do without another unstructured celebrity Zoom hangcast — but one has to marvel at its magnificence as a piece of financial engineering. A cobbled-together podcast sponsored by Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile and George Clooney’s Casamigos Tequila meant to support the late night shows’ striking and out-of-works staffers? It’s almost enough to gloss over the sheer homogeneity of it all. |
| What’s further interesting here is the potential comparison you can draw between Strike Force Five and how Smartless emerged from the pandemic, another recent period of time when many Hollywood denizens were unable to work. Podcasts remain a squishy area of participation for striking guild members, but for the most part, members who work on shows that are separate and apart from the greater Hollywood infrastructure largely seem to be in the clear. (Rewatch podcasts, on the other hand, are very much in the gray zone.) Still, there’s a hard cap to any similarities that can be drawn between Smartless and Strike Force Five, as the likelihood for an extended entanglement between the five late night hosts is extremely unlikely given the competition among their respective networks. And as it stands, there hasn’t seemed to be another breakout podcast from the strike era… |
| Strike Force Five is officially scheduled to run for “at least” twelve weeks, the actual length of which has to do with however the strike resolves. Whenever it goes away, though, those with whetted appetites would probably like to know that some of the late night hosts are already available in podcast form. You could dig back into the earliest episodes of The Bugle for a younger, less successful John Oliver. CBS recirculates excerpts of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as a podcast. Same goes with NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers, though Meyers himself has a separate hang-cast with his brother Josh, called Family Trips. Former morning radio DJ Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t podcast, and neither does the other Jimmy, apparently. |
| ➽ An oddity: Sony Music Entertainment seems to be republishing The Just Enough Family as part of its subscription plan, called The Binge. Hosted by Ariel Levy and EP’d by Melinda Shopsin, the series originally rolled out in 2021, and it was highly regarded in that year’s Vulture Podcast Survey. I’m a big fan of it as well. |
| > Eh, I’ll be honest: the thing I’ve been listening to the most lately is the audio rip of a wonky daily Canadian news show from the CBC called Power and Politics. Sorry, I’m boring like that. |
| And that’s a wrap for 1.5x Speed! Hope you enjoyed it. We’re back next week, but in the meantime… |
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