A New Genre Of Podcasts Mirrors A 'Bojack Horseman Joke
Everybody has a podcast now, and why should famous people be any different? What's that? "Because they have more prestigious and lucrative work to do"? Such is the elephant in the digital room of the new genre of podcast in which former co-stars chat for over an hour at a time about the show they used to be on that hasn't been on the air in a decade.
First on Office Ladies and now Fake Doctors, Real Friends, the actors spend each episode actually watching the show in question (The Office and Scrubs, respectively), sort of like a commentary track except 1) you can't see or hear anything or they'll get sued by Hulu, and 2) it's not happening in real-time, so you can't set up a Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz situation, either. It's like if Bojack and Sarah Lynn recorded their Horsin' Around viewing sessions, but we're supposed to pretend it's not weird and sad.
In the case of Office Ladies, at least TV's Pam Beesley and Angela Martin Lipton Schrute carefully dole out enough legitimately interesting trivia about Netflix's most-streamed series to keep fans listening and entertainment reporters splooging, like the contents of Jim's teapot note and the perfect moments that were accidents. The same is unlikely to be true of Zach Braff and Donald Faison's Scrubs rewatch podcast.
In the first episode, released yesterday, they reveal the sensational observations that some people knew the show was a big deal and some didn't, they remember some things and not others, and they were significantly younger. At one point, Faison has to explain to Braff that butt implants are a real thing during an uncomfortably lengthy discussion of their female co-star's ass. Even the most die-hard Scrubs fan will probably only be disappointed. After all, if you want to hear Zach Braff say "bro" and "fuck" a lot, you can probably just call him.
Maybe that's too harsh. So long as these, ahem, semi-retired performers are giving the stans and bloggers the content they crave, there are certainly worse things they could do with all that residual money. It's just that when your next career move is an actual Bojack Horseman gag, it might be time to rethink things.
Top Image: ABC Studios
