In 2014, Alex Blumberg, a longtime audio reporter and producer for “This American Life” and “Planet Money,” made a bold move: at some risk to him and his family, he left his stable public-radio job and co-founded a podcast company. An audio storyteller who’d focussed on business reporting in recent years, Blumberg wondered if he could take what he’d learned, put it to use, start the new company, which was later called Gimlet, and make a podcast about that process that was both educational and entertaining. “StartUp” Season 1, Gimlet’s first podcast, is as engaging as it is meta. Blumberg is a companionable guide through the world of startup culture and narrative audio’s expansion from public radio into the commercial realm. He sounds smart and capable but bumblingly human like the rest of us—in the first episode, he struggles to find appropriate shoes for an investor pitch meeting, then sounds like a “douchebag,” as he puts it, when he gets there. At one point in the meeting, the potential investor, Chris Sacca, takes over the pitch, running circles around what Blumberg has said, dazzling him with arguments both pro and con, and then decides to pass. The episode is called “How Not to Pitch a Billionaire.” Blumberg began “StartUp,” as his peers started “Serial,” before knowing how its first season would end—and, like the makers of “Serial,” he had the confidence to know that it would pay off.
It has. In 2018, podcasts are booming, Gimlet and other audio networks are thriving, podcasters are increasingly getting TV and movie deals, and we’ve arrived at the second meta incarnation of Blumberg’s story: the ABC sitcom “Alex, Inc.,” developed from “StartUp,” in which Blumberg has been transformed into Zach Braff. Several episodes in, it’s a fascinatingly weird cultural creation, and a triumph of network television, in that it takes the story of an interesting person with a Zeitgeisty job and transforms it into something that feels like it needs a laugh track. Braff-Alex is a standard-issue American sitcom dad with mild Blumbergian parallels. He works in a huge shabby-chic incubator space with distressed walls, giant windows, and wacky co-workers; he has a wry, loving wife (the excellent Tiya Sircar), and two adorable kids (Elisha Henig and Audyssie James); he suffers as many physical pratfalls as a dad from “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” He’s batted around like Wile E. Coyote—take that, nerd!—and, in the pilot, a baby doll that’s being used in a prototype at the incubator keeps getting catapulted across the room. If you come to “Alex, Inc.” as a “StartUp” enthusiast, rather than as a Braff enthusiast, the show feels amusingly surreal: a translation to the screen that recalls the “Paging Mr. Herman” scene at the end of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”
As the season began, I suspected that prime-time television didn’t know what to do with podcasts—or that it feared them. For the curious audiophile watching “Alex, Inc.,” catching a rare glimpse of a microphone, a recording-equipment bag, or egg-crate padding in a sound booth provided a little frisson of excitement, like seeing an actor friend playing a perp on a police procedural. Slapstick, and particularly slapstick that gets us out of audio-related situations, has often been in the show’s wheelhouse. In one episode, Braff’s work is repeatedly interrupted when his cheap office chair flings him onto the concrete floor. In another, he and his cousin and business partner (Michael Imperioli, only lightly removed from his role as Christopher on “The Sopranos”) tussle inside their flimsy recording booth and Alex crashes through it in a shower of broken glass, landing on the concrete floor. In another, a visiting broadcasting legend tells a story about radio, and the desk he’s sitting on collapses, sending him crashing to the concrete floor.
In earlier sitcoms with radio settings—“WKRP in Cincinnati,” “NewsRadio,” “Frasier”—radio broadcasting was part of the drama and the fun. And the podcast world has been made vivid on TV for less mainstream audiences. Marc Maron’s half-hour comedy “Maron,” which ran for four seasons on IFC, had Maron playing a version of himself, making his podcast. “American Vandal,” the brilliant Netflix parody of true-crime documentaries, is also a critique of and an homage to true-crime-podcast culture. The “Serial” parodies on “S.N.L.” and “Funny or Die” mimicked Sarah Koenig’s cadences, the show’s plinking, addictive theme music, and the elusiveness of solutions to its mystery. On a “Portlandia” true-crime-podcasting sketch from December, podcasters infiltrate a police station and narrate the goings on with a limp, poetic intonation—“The air is humid in Portland, Oregon. There’s an inescapable closeness that feels almost oppressive”—and a banjo player and a fiddler follow them around.
When “Alex, Inc.” does engage with audio head on, it produces the series’ strongest scenes. In the first episode, Alex explains his passion for audio narratives to his kids. Racing around the kitchen, he imitates various interviewees and improvises sound effects, piecing a story together as the family laughs in delight. In the fifth episode, his hard-to-please mother-in-law (Anjali Bhimani) visits, stressing him out—but in the end, she decides to show her entrepreneur son-in-law love and wisdom, in the form of advice, a story, and good tape. “I’m going to tell you a story, so get your giant microphone out of your manny-pack,” she says. “It’s going to be a good one.” What comes next made me feel genuine emotion, and made “Alex, Inc.” a better show. It was what audio people would call a “driveway moment.”
Early “Alex, Inc.” has lacked the sense of purpose that immediately distinguished “StartUp” and “Serial,” but it understands the value of such confidence. In the pilot, Alex’s son Ben reminds his father of how good Alex is at audio journalism—Ben seems to have a kind of oracle function, frequently providing his father with lightning-bolt insights—and Alex, bursting with self-esteem, crashes the family car through a private jet’s security gate and races up to Chris Sacca, playing himself, to declare that crafting audio narratives is hard and that he does it better than anybody else. Sacca nods and smiles: that’s what he has been waiting for. (In what amounts to a meta triple axel, Sacca provided Blumberg with this insight in “StartUp.”) “Alex, Inc.” has been tentative in asserting itself as a podcast sitcom, but it may be making progress: the most recent episodes—six and seven, which aired last night—were full of microphones, headphones, and the word “podcast.” Characters went to radio stations and spoke on the air; they proposed show ideas, made podcast teasers, created a murder-mystery show, got interviewees comfortable on mike. (Fascinatingly, our faux Gimlet now seems to be making a faux “StartUp” and a faux “Serial.”) There’s little indication that “Alex, Inc.” will ever reflect the quality of the show and network that spawned it—but on last night’s episodes, Alex didn’t once fall on a concrete floor.
Sourse: newyorker.com
