The Podcasts Caitlin Pierce Is Listening To Right Now
Plus: superlatives with the hosts of This Had Oscar Buzz.
Six suitors. One “star.” Multiple elimination rounds of phone dates that build up to two choices: who the star picks to go on an all-expenses-paid vacation, and whether the selected suitor will reciprocate and go on that trip with them — or take a cash prize instead.
That’s the deliciously fun premise behind Hang Up, a reality dating podcast by Zakiya Gibbons, Caitlin Pierce, and Ben Montoya. Pierce is the one who developed the show, and based on both the premise and the format, you can probably tell it was designed by someone with a keen appreciation for reality television in all its forms. When I caught up with Pierce a few weeks ago, the second season’s climatic episode — “Decision Day” — was just rolling out to feeds. “Obviously, it’s my favorite day,” she said.
Pierce came up with the idea for Hang Up around the end of 2020: a tough time, obviously. “I was really craving something fun to listen to, but I also have a pretty strong taste for stuff that’s highly edited,” she explained. Few podcasts out there seemed to fit the bill. She ended up thinking a lot about how narrative stakes, in podcasting at least, were often automatically equated with heavy material, and she eventually started to observe her own tastes with reality television, whose hooks often revolve around the generation of stakes that, ultimately, don’t actually matter much at all.
Love Is Blind was a clear reference point. “There was a season one episode that stuck with me in particular,” she recalled. “There was a couple who broke up because the man came out as bisexual — it was very clear [to me] that the producers made it into a bigger plot point than it needed to be. He was crying about it and I was just like, ‘This is so weird. This would not be how this would actually go.’” Pierce felt there was a better way to do this.
She drew on other inspirations as well, like the eighth iteration of Are You The One?, which she regards as an “iconic queer reality season,” and Top Chef, the Bravo reality competition that likely ranks as her favorite franchise in the genre. “There can be a level of toxicity on cooking shows sometimes, but you can tell Top Chef has a real level of respect for its contestants,” she said. “It’s a different vibe, and I love that. So much so that, like, I would actually watch Top Chef and write some of our intro language based on it [laughs].” (You’ll see Top Chef pop up later as a pick, by the way.)
Now that Hang Up’s second season has concluded, Pierce is already getting things going for the third: Right now, the show is accepting applicants. When I asked about what she generally looked for in a potential applicant, Pierce had a fairly specific response. “It has to be someone who is open to, uh, a really silly experience and also knowing that there is a high possibility of rejection,” she says. “We want people who are going to be true to themselves during the experience. But mostly, we’re looking for people who’d just like to meet other people and have a really fun time.” Honestly, all that sounds like good dating advice in general.
On the occasion of Hang Up recently capping off its sophomore season, I asked Pierce to talk about a few podcasts — and other things — she’s enjoyed lately.
Podcast: Because The Boss Belongs to Us
Molten Heart’s new series reframing Bruce Springsteen as a queer icon.
Obviously, we all operate in an industry, so there’s a bit of like, “I listen to what my friends make!” But I also think that when people say they don’t know where to find new podcasts, my thing is always: Just listen to the credits of shows you like, then go listen to other things those people have made. It’s so much more simple than people think.
In this case, Because The Boss Belongs to Us is by Jazmine (JT) Green, who’s a true artist. She handles things with a slight touch where things could be really heavy. With this show … I like a silly premise or lens sometimes, you know? You have this low-stakes quest, but you also get to have smart conversations and learn a lot of things along the way. The high-low of it all. Anytime you bring up the notion of queer or Black history, there’s this tendency to overemphasize the dark and traumatic moments — and those are absolutely true and important, but we shouldn’t skip over the lighter things as well. That’s part of history too. That’s part of culture. This show does such a good job at having fun, talking about Bruce Springsteen’s dyke outfits while learning about different eras of lesbian culture.
Podcast: Proxy with Yowei Shaw
The former Invisibilia host reports on her own experience getting laid off.
In a similar vein, I do want to talk about Yowei’s Proxy, which is so silly despite the material. I love how meta the show is. In part, it’s basically a series about her getting laid off and also a series where she’s trying to make this show but continually not being able to get it made because of all the layoffs and every show getting canceled. I like shows that are about process, and that show the labor of something getting made.
TV: Top Chef (Season 21)
The Bravo reality competition show, mostly recently set in Wisconsin.
First of all, it’s one of the only shows my husband and I can reliably agree that we both wanna watch. I also really do like this new season — I think Kristen [Kish] is great. You can love both Kristen and Padma at the same time, that’s important to remind people of.
I also know someone on this season: Danny. My husband works in the service industry, and he worked with Danny when we were all in New York. They did pop-ups together. Both were at The Nomad.
Honestly, I don’t know why I like Top Chef so much. The show is really honest, but really respectful at the same time. You can tell they’re actually really good chefs, and you get to see them change and grow over the run of a season. There are two parallel things going on: one, do they want to be Top Chef and actually win the show? And two, they have this opportunity to get feedback from people they genuinely respect. It’s great.
Book: “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler
Butler’s 1993 novel about a young woman in a post-apocalyptic world wrecked by climate change and extreme inequality.
I just started reading Octavia Butler for the first time (I know, I know). But turns out, it’s perfect timing. Her book Parable of the Sower that I just finished starts with a fictional diary entry from July 20, 2024. And it’s truly eerie how accurately she predicted what our present day would be like when she wrote it more than 30 years ago.
This Had Oscar Buzz Turns 300 (Episodes!)
Podcasting was how I first got introduced to Joe Reid, now a contributor here at Vulture and our mighty Cinematrix lord, who hosts This Had Oscar Buzz with the entertainment writer Chris Feil. The podcast pretty much delivers on the premise of its title: In each episode, they take up a movie and dig deep into the awards buzz and critical conversation it generated during its time. It’s a good time, and this week, they celebrated hitting 300 episodes with a dive into a 2016 Will Smith I completely have no memory ever existing: Collateral Beauty. Shit, even Focus stuck in my mind more.
Anyway, to commemorate the grand occasion, we here at Vulture decided to run Joe and Chris through the Superlatives gamut. Enjoy!
The episode that went the longest
Chris Feil: Have we cracked three hours? We’ve been close. Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! was one that cracked the seal on longer episodes because there was a lot to get into, especially our own against-the-tide feelings about it.
Joe Reid: Okay, I just checked and we have yet to crack three hours, but we’ve been knocking on the door a few times. The Eyes Wide Shut episode hit 2:55, though I think that was assisted by a Movie Fantasy League check-in, so I’m gonna give the tiebreaker to the finale episode of our “100 Years, 100 Snubs” miniseries, which also went 2:55.
The episodes you were most eager to do
C.F.: Episodes we know we will eventually do are like Dianne Wiest’s trauma stones in your pocket in Rabbit Hole: They’re always in the ether until you reach in your pocket and “Oh! That!” This is why doing Collateral Beauty for our 300th feels like a new chapter for the show. I think the way we discussed that movie as friends when it was released set some of the tone of what we do on the show, so in a way, it’s always felt like a holy grail we knew we would eventually do. But I don’t think we could have properly unpacked everything going on in that deeply unwell movie without delivering an episode longer than the actual running time of Satantango.
J.R.: Our red meat episodes! The classics. I could list a dozen but I will stick to the prompt and say that as a massive fan of The Hours, I knew we’d do an incredible episode on Evening, and we did, with our great friend Richard Lawson.
The episodes you’ll (probably) never do
C.F.: We tend to adopt a “never say never” mindset in regards to what we might cover, but if it’s a title we haven’t done yet, sometimes the reason is simply because it wouldn’t make for the most interesting conversation. Or they’re like Oliver Stone’s W. and we ask ourselves “would people really want to listen to that?”
J.R.: Sometimes it’s just that I don’t want to have to sit through a particular movie again. Like, am I going to force myself to watch Out of the Furnace again when instead we could do The Producers? Sometimes it’s that I don’t want to pick on a movie with noble intentions that I didn’t connect with (Never Rarely Sometimes Always comes to mind). Sometimes it’s just that the subject matter and ephemera around a movie are too much of a bummer, like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s By the Sea. I can’t imagine ever doing that movie on the podcast now.
The episodes with the trickiest trivia
C.F.: I get really tripped up when something should be [on IMDb] but isn’t, and then my mind hyper-fixates on that omission until I can’t remember the name of any other movie ever made. This recently happened when Joe gave me Judy Davis [as part of the podcast’s recurring IMDb trivia game], which was missing Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows, probably her most celebrated performance. Open the schools! Or make it available on streaming! Fix it, Steve!
J.R.: IMDb Known For hates television, which makes certain actors who are better known for TV than movies very tricky. Like, YOU try to name four Kim Dickens projects when at most one is TV. (I love Kim Dickens, by the way.)
The actor who has been discussed on the most episodes
C.F.: We’ve had a full dozen Nicole Kidman films. Even though Meryl Streep is right behind her, I don’t see her overtaking Kidman at this point. We’ll have to do something unhinged for when we complete 20 Kidmans.
J.R: As we were reminded in her AFI speech, Nicole takes a lot of chances with buzzy directors, and that results in a lot of buzzy misses. And we’re not close to being tapped on her filmography either. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus will happen.
C.F.: Consider it a threat.
The podcast’s most memorable guests
C.F.: Whitney and Mariah on our Exodus: Gods and Kings episode, kinda.
J.R.: Yeah, until the fair-use police came a-calling. We’ve had incredible guests! An Emmy nominee, an Oscar nominee, and a Drama Desk nominee, among others. My great friend Pamela Ribon recorded with us in the interim between when she was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination and when she actually got it, which is the most “in the mix” our podcast has ever been, I think.
C.F.: Preserving that moment in time with Pam is, I think, one of the show’s finest moments.
The snubs that still hurt
C.F.: Honestly, Widows. With most of the movies we talk about, their chances on the actual nomination morning were typically dead, or their best chances were narrowed down to a single performance or category. But Widows was on the bubble for multiple nominations right up until nomination morning, I would argue.
J.R.: Those are my favorite episodes, because I do end up going absolutely nuts. Like “HOW?? HOW DID THIS NOT HAPPEN??” Meg Ryan for When a Man Loves a Woman — a great performance from a beloved actress doing buzzy subject matter in a famously weak Best Actress year. What the HELL?!
The hardest episodes to research
C.F.: That is something I think we’re pretty adept at, though our miniseries about films of the 1970s we did this May asked a little more of us in this regard. Because in that era, you’re talking about an entirely different awards ecosystem than we have today, with a different set of expectation-versus-results criteria that are the foundation of what our show is.
J.R.: Yeah, the farther back we go in time, it’s not just that we’re stepping out of our own lived memory, but also the Oscar machine didn’t always exist in the way it does now. Those are definitely the most challenging.
The time you disagreed the most
C.F.: We’re more likely to have qualitative disagreements than about a film’s circumstances. Like Milos Forman telling Natalie Portman on the set of Goya’s Ghosts “you’re acting like you’re in a bad movie, but it’s not a bad movie, it’s a good movie!” We’re more likely to be in disagreement of what does and doesn’t succeed, and in the exact opposite direction. Joe says “good movie, bad performance,” I’ll be “bad movie, good performance.”
J.R.: I remember when we did The Counselor, we very much fundamentally disagreed on whether Cameron Diaz was giving a great performance that was unfairly maligned by squaresville critics or a catastrophic performance that may not have single-handedly tanked the movie’s awards chances but certainly went a long way towards doing so. One of those takes is more fun than the other because you get to be like “Justice for Cameron Diaz, our cheetah-print queen,” while the other has to be all “Why are you booing me? I’m right!”
C.F: So you’re saying I’m more fun …
How Disneyland Became America’s Great National Park
By Rebecca Alter
By far the buzziest piece of criticism of the year so far — more talked-about and clicked-upon than that scathing literati takedown in Bookforum, or all of those Madame Web drubbings, or even the worst and meanest of reactions to the new Katy Perry song — is a four-hour video in which YouTuber Jenny Nicholson thoroughly analyzes every inch of the now-defunct Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser immersive hotel at Walt Disney World. The screed, which is 33% longer than Oppenheimer, has had over 9.2 million views since it dropped in mid May, and its popularity proves that adult Disney tourism is far from niche. Disney adults, that much-maligned subgenre of person, have truly become the mainstream. And Disney’s Parks division knows it, it earns 70% of the company’s operating income, compared to the entertainment and streaming division’s 11%.
It’s what great thinkers from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to American philosopher Shailene Woodley have long attested: It’s all Disneyland, baby. Mickeys all the way down. Just look at the current presidential candidates and their animatronic counterparts in Magic Kingdom’s Hall of Presidents and tell me who looks more taut-skinned and lifelike. That’s the simulacrum in action. But how did a scrappy Jazz Age animation studio peddling a Felix the Cat knockoff become, in essence, a travel, real-estate, and robotics-engineering company? How did Disney World’s Cinderella Castle become an American landmark on the level of Mount Rushmore? And how did the development of a Tomorrowland ride possibly influence the Space Race? We get into all that with the help of some experts on this week’s episode of Land of the Giants: The Disney Dilemma.
News and Notes
➽ Been a bit since we’ve gotten a new audio joint from Rose Eveleth, but they’re back with a limited series project, called “Tested,” about the complex century-long history of sex testing female athletes in elite sports. It’s a co-production between NPR and the CBC, and the six-part doc is being distributed under the Embedded banner. The first ep dropped yesterday.
➽ Started to tuck into an indie project called A Sense of Rebellion, by the writer-researcher Evgeny Morozov, about the long, influential shadow cast by a group of sixties-era eccentrics over the development of what we now describe as “personal technology.” Curious to see where this goes, but a fun fact about the project: it features original music by Brian Eno (!?).
➽ No shortage of bits and bobs coming out of Spotify: Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper is hunting for a new deal; Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert is moving to Wondery; the platform is launching comments for podcasts, which they claim people are asking for but are they really; the company is retooling its ad sales team; and it raised prices this month. Honestly, though: This far deep into the enshittification cycle, it’s hard to care.
Related