Please Stop With The Celebrity Interview Podcasts

Remember the good old days on TV and radio when celebrities were interviewed by people trained to ask questions in a public forum? Ah, the old days. A troubling and annoying trend in podcasting is the fire hose of celebrity interview shows.

I love Julia Louis Dreyfuss. I loved her in Seinfeld and especially in Veep. She has a new podcast called 50 Women Over 50. It’s pitched as a “podcast for women whose personal confidence is borne of experience. Interviews with 50 women to learn how they see the world; what lessons they’ve learned; what advice they have for us all.”

It’s just that every celebrity with a little time on their hands has plunged into the interview podcast pool, and all that splashing has listeners wondering how they ended in the deep end of this ego-stroking pool.

Celebrity podcasts have overwhelmed the sea wall built to protect listeners from celebrity self-love, self-absorption, and self-actualization.

We have the heavy hitters like Meghan Markle in Archetypes and Michelle Obama and then the lesser-known celebs like Justin Long, Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop (Heaven help us), and Seth Rogen.

It’s not that all of these celebrity podcasts are bad — except for Snooki & Joey — but like true-crime podcasts, there are just too many of them.

There are so many of these podcasts that there is a podcast called the Celebrity Podcast Podcast that covers celebrity podcasts. Talk about meta.

So I know what you’re saying? What’s your problem?

After all, broadcast TV has lovable trash like The Bachelor and Bachelorette and The Masked Singer. Discovery has an entire channel dedicated to skewering humanity with shows like 1000-lb Sisters and MILF Manor (jeez).

No problem. To each their own. But TV also has Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, Yellowstone, and 60 Minutes.

My problem is that I’m frightened that podcasting will be the recycling plant for celebrities with nothing to do or those with fading careers inundating the medium. Podcasting already has a problem with the true-crime genre overwhelming the medium.

Podcasting, like TV and radio, is a zero-sum game. We are definitely seeing that now in streaming TV, where execs just woke up and realized streaming isn’t a moneymaker. On TV, for example, all those Chicago shows, NCIS spinoffs, or Law And Order franchises crowd out other potential shows that offer viewers quality programming at a similar cost.

In podcasting, there are some terrific interview shows. Fresh Air, WTF with Marc Maron, How I Built This, Vox Conversations, Jemele Hill Is Unbothered, and The Jordan Harbinger Show, and so many more.

With Spotify and other networks pulling back on money and resources for podcasting, every new celebrity podcast means one less potential quality podcast from a person listeners have not yet heard of.

There’s an old maxim in entertainment — and in life — that media execs will always destroy a good show, but giving the audience too much of a good thing.

In 2001, ABC put on its hit game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with Regis Philbin four nights a week. At the time, the show was riding the crest of incredible ratings, societal ubiquity, and the public’s obsession with the latest shiny new object. So what happened? The show got canceled because viewers eventually got tired of all that overexposure.

Back to celebrity podcasts. How many is too many? Sometimes, it seems like every celebrity has a podcast. Does a celebrity on a reality show who became famous for “Karen” behavior really deserve a podcast? And isn’t that podcast going to crowd out the aspirational podcasters who start their own interview shows without the spotlight of having received a rose ten years ago on a reality TV show?

Marc Maron was not a celebrity when he started his podcast out of his garage. Believe it or not, Joe Rogan was simply a former reality show TV host when he started his podcast.

Are all those celebrity podcasts flooding the podcasting space, crowding out the potential for unknowns to surface and become household names? Is podcasting becoming Kardashian-ized like reality TV?

It’s bad enough that Dr. Phil has a podcast. So no more TV castoffs and celebrity laughingstocks on podcasts. If celebrities are sliding into podcasting, please make it people like Dreyfuss, Lupita Nyong’o, and Emma Watson.

For me, the best celebrity podcast is Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda. Smart, intellectually curious, and far-ranging, the show is, as one reviewer commented, “The perfect mix of insightful and humanistic conservation.”