In the latest episode of the Substandard (subscribe or leave a review! We blew past 100 reviews last week so, as promised, Bill Kristol's intro this week is extra hateful!) JVL, Vic, and myself pay tribute to the Gong Show and discuss reboots and remakes of all stripes: Power Rangers, CHiPS, some other stuff. If you want to hang out with some dorks who enjoy hanging out with each other, give it a listen, you'll love it.
I use the "dorks hanging out" formulation to describe the Substandard because I basically agree with Dan McLaughlin that the podcast, as a form, is an inefficient way to consume information. The Substandard—and, frankly, a lot of other podcasts and radio shows that I like, are basically just friends chatting. If you enjoy our show (and a lot of you seem to; I love* each and every one of you nuts) it's because you enjoy just kind of listening to us chit chat.
All of this is a preamble to say that I found this description of podcasting over at the New Republic to be ... well, not wrong, exactly, just unfamiliar:
Even though podcasts share no particular style and very few conventions, a sense of high purpose lingers around them. Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it’s a history lecture broadcast from a university, or an amateur talk show recorded in someone’s garage. Both types of show are somewhat educational, in the sense that they expose listeners to unfamiliar subjects and subcultures. But the essence of a podcast is to be esoteric, specialized. And sometimes it’s hard to draw a line between the specific and the trivial.
(Emphases mine.) I can't dispute that characterization, exactly, but the thing I really love about The Substandard is that JVL and Vic and I kind of embrace the trivial specificity of our milieu. We're chatting about unimportant crap—but, importantly, it's unimportant crap that a lot of people really like. And we're doing it in a way that is very slightly informative and, hopefully, slightly less-slightly entertaining. I think it works, but your mileage may vary.
So what's the purpose of a podcast? Hell if I know. There's a reason The Substandard's pretty unlikely to crack the iTunes top 100. But if we can hang out in the top 100 or so in the TV and Film category (and we can if you subscribe, download, leave a review, sacrifice your first born to the spirit of Steve Jobs, etc.)—well, hell, I'll take it. I'm just glad to know that we're not shouting into the void totally unheard, you know?
*Fact check: Four Pinocchios, I hate everyone.