‘A punchline for a certain kind of millennialness’: why TV dramas treat podcasters as a joke
When Carrie Bradshaw was hauled back onscreen 17 years after the final Sex and the City episode aired for new spin-off And Just Like That, fans knew updates and changes were inevitable. But few saw the Vogue dating columnist swapping out her iconic feathered peacock headpiece for gigantic headphones and a Zoom audio. Bradshaw, to the surprise of many, had become a podcaster.
The elegant Bradshaw perched in a recording studio with a WeWork aesthetic is already an absurd situation. But the show she co-presents on the programme takes this a step further by wringing comedy out of the whole concept of the podcast. X, Y and Me is introduced to viewers as “the podcast that talks about gender roles, sexual roles and Cinnamon rolls – all the roles
I care passionately about”. There’s also a co-host to “represent cis het men”, while sound effects featuring words like “woke moment” boom out across the show in a wrestling commentator-style voice.
Whether it’s Bradshaw in And Just Like That, or the deliberately hammy audio hosts in Only Murders in the Building and ITV crime drama Karen Pirie, podcasters are television’s latest punchline. From unhinged true crime fanatics turned citizen journalists to narcissistic men with microphones and brash opinions, these hungry new media types are ravaging television. But what makes the industry and the subsequent new stereotypes so ripe for satire?
When it comes to And Just Like That, podcasting’s popularity in recent years made it a neat device for portraying Bradshaw as a fish out of water. “[It was] one more way of signalling Carrie’s alienation due to her age,” says Juno Dawson, author and co-host of the Sex and the City podcast So I Got to Thinking. “I think the remit of the reboot was to explore how culture has moved on, leaving some women – who were previously at the cutting edge – behind somewhat.”
The show might not exactly have triumphed in this attempt, sadly – at least when it comes to podcasts. “It