If they make a right, the podcast immediately ends and the passenger needs to find a new way home. TV’s Jon Daly has a new sandbox to play in: Formerly Deliberately Wasting Your Time - recently hastily renamed to avoid problems with a preexisting podcast - alternates between critiquing other podcasts, reviewing The Sopranos, and putting Daly in the car with Jon Schroeder ( Bob’s Burgers) and a guest to cruise around Los Angeles chatting while making only left turns. Despite what the title suggests, this podcast is a deliciously voyeuristic listening experience that goes far above and beyond a “normal” good time. The listener can’t help but relate and become completely absorbed in the hijinks that begin with twins “Maya and Naya” traveling to the other side of the world with “Jenny from L.A.” and end with answering the question “Is my friend dead?” McKinney urges listeners to ponder the very nature of gossip, peppering clarifying questions and encouraging post-mortem analyses that underscore the ways in which the truth can evolve or even be lost through time and retelling. And what a compelling finale this is: McKinney, Claire Fallon, and Emma Gray are detail-rich storytellers, painting vivid pictures of a quirky all-female cast on a Southeast Asian adventure. Each episode delves into gossip from a different walk of life: There’s camper gossip, knitting-community gossip, and in this season-finale episode, international-travel-and-potential-abduction gossip. Hosted by author and journalist-turned-gossip queen Kelsey McKinney, the Normal Gossip podcast is a partly personal, partly listener-sourced collection of funny, frequently dramatic, and wildly enjoyable gossip about strangers (with identifying details anonymized, of course). What’s better than some juicy gossip? Juicy gossip out of context. By the time they get to the ultimate showdown (spoiler alert: I kind of let the cat out of the bag already), I felt I already had a dog in the fight. From the stuffy members of the wine club and fellow residents of the Elliott Bay Towers to Lilith Sternin to Bebe Glazer, the episode does a nifty job of letting us know a lot about these many characters. (Moose, Martin Crane’s Jack Russell terrier, doesn’t count since he was a regular on the show.) Heller leaves some open spots on the bracket for Flores to fill out, and the two spend the better part of an hour letting the characters duke it out. Heller comes to the table (or the Zoom) with an already crazy fleshed-out bunch of recurring characters to kick things off, from Frasier Crane’s exes and loony neighbors down to Baby the cockatoo.
I’m not a fanatic about the Kelsey Grammer–starring NBC sitcom, but the deep dive that Flores and her guest take into the show’s characters made me want to start binging immediately. It’s a reference to the bracket-style battle royale among minor characters from Frasier that guest Emily Heller fills out along with host comedian and No. Despite the title, this episode of I’m Listening dropped in April.