Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Savage Love - Episode 434


Synopsis: Dan fields questions about from both ends of the low libido relationship spectrum, councils a man with a friend deep in the closet, and struggles to allay the worries of a woman in a May/September romance.

Upshot: A fully adequate episode. Only two of the five calls are particularly interesting, but, as always, Dan handles their questions with panache.

Full review after the jump:

Risk! - Live from Chapel Hill 2


Synopsis: Kevin tells a story about his first trip to San Francisco, Amy Allen tells a story about purchasing her first vibrator, Ray Christian relates about the dangerous games he played as a child and Bianca Casusol tells a story about a her first doomed romance after getting preternaturally divorced.

Upshot: A good series of stories, though by far the best one is Ray Christian’s tale of unsupervised mayhem.

Full review after the jump:

Monday, February 16, 2015

StartUp - #14 Where We Are


Synopsis: StartUp ends its first season as Alex Blumberg checks in with his wife and then Chris Sacca, his business mentor. He wrestles with how much of himself he’s willing to devote to creating a “huge scale media company”. Then we get a preview of “season 2” with new host, Lisa Chow.

Upshot: As with the all of the episodes of StartUp, Alex offers us a truthful and sometimes painfully earnest assessment of his business venture. It’s frankly a muddled and mealy mouthed ending to a muddled and mealy mouthed season. But the preview of the upcoming season sounds surprisingly good.

Full review after the jump:

Comedy Bang Bang - The Wedding of Gilli and Gary

Synopsis: It's the long awaited wedding of Gillian Jacobs and famed director Garry Marshall, with special musical guest Colin Hay.

Upshot: It's even better than you imagine. It's one of those rare-ish CBB episodes that is both high on the in-jokes and an absolute blast on its own. An always delight Gillian Jacobs and a surprisingly game Colin Hay support Paul F. Tompkins in a cavalcade of four different simultaneous characters. Best of the new year, by far.

Full review after the jump

TAL - Cops See it Differently, Part Two

Summary: In this second half of a two-parter, This American Life continues to look at how racial bias affects police departments around the country. The first story is about a Florida department gone mad by arrest quotas, and in the second they look at how Las Vegas is trying to take on racial bias head on.

Upshot: Following on the heels of last week's very strong episode, TAL does a good job of examining this thorny topic. A must listen for This American Life fans.

Full review after the jump:

Hello World!

Welcome to my new blog. Here at the Podcast Dilettante, I'll be reviewing a variety of podcasts on hopefully a daily basis, or semi-daily basis. I've been a long listener of podcasts and as the years have progressed I find that I spend more and more of my time listening to them. There are so many podcasts out there that I felt that they needed an appreciation site. The A.V. Club still does a weekly round up called podmass, but often their reviews are fairly scant and insubstantial, especially when compared to the great work that site does with T.V. Shows, games, and films.


Obviously, I'm one man, and I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to devote to the upkeep of this blog, but as the wise man said, the road to disappointment is paved with lofty ambitions. With that said: I follow a lot of podcasts, and while not all of them are ripe for review, especially some of the smaller ones, I do plan on reviewing many. Here is a list of the thirty podcast I plan on covering on this site. If you have any suggestions for podcasts you'd like me to cover, please comment as I'm pretty open to suggestion.

So that's a lot. We'll see how this week goes. Of course several of those podcasts are biweekly, and some happen whenever the folks behind it feel like putting out an episode (I'm looking at you Superego and Radiolab...). Others conform to a much more regular weekly schedule. I'll be reviewing any that I listen to, and I'll give a quick TL;DR (another good podcast) at the top of each review letting you know if it's worth listening to. This isn't exactly fair to some of the anthology shows, like Risk! or This American Life, as a collection of stories can often be uneven with highs and lows, but we'll see how it goes. 

A quick note about some absences on that list. Obviously one of the biggest and most notable podcasts, Mark Maron's WTF is off that list. That's because, while I've definitely found some of his podcasts to be transcendent, I find that my interest in listening to an episode correlates with how much I want to hear from whatever guest he's interviewing, and lately as he's been interviewing more and more musicians and less and less comedians, I've found that I barely listen to the podcast anymore. Also, and this is just me, but I sometimes find Mark Maron, while always impressively honest and vulnerable (which is why I think he makes such a great and truly unique interviewer) also gets on my nerves a bit. I often find myself wanting to shout at him: Shut the fuck up, Maron! Nobody cares about your neuroses!! 

But obviously a lot of people do. And I'll probably occasionally review his show when he interviews somebody of interest to me, or if I catch wind that it's a good show. If you start following this blog, let me know.

Another absence from the list is Welcome to Night Vale. This is a supremely interesting and darkly funny podcast that I came very late to discovering last spring, but already has a rabid following. Set in a Lovecraftian/Twilight-Zone like nightmare town, called Night Vale, the podcast is ostensibly a public service radio show for a town that sublimely treats the horrific with a sense of banal normalcy. It is also has a long mythology and is tight on continuity. Leaping into a current episode without backstory can feel like being at a party with a tight knit group of friends telling injokes that you just aren't getting. I will at some point get caught up, but they're dense episodes, and as you can see, I already listen to a lot of podcasts as it is, so I just haven't had the energy to backtrack and listen to all of the prior episodes.

There is a lot more to discuss about podcasting in general: about the form, the art, the craft, and the business. But we'll have plenty of time for those kind of discussions later. Periodically I'll review new podcasts that are not on that list, and again, if there's a particular podcast you'd like me to check out, let me know via your comments.

I'm not actually sure anybody's going to read this blog, but I personally know that I enjoy reading analysis of the things I love and I just felt that there was a lack of good podcasting reviews out there. But then I could be wrong on that account too. Regardless of how long this lasts, I'm looking forward to it and thanks for coming along for the ride!