This podcast is tough to listen to, but massively rewarding
Here’s the deal: Radiotopia.FM, the brainchild of Roman Mars (99% Invisible, PRX Remix) and the Public Radio Exchange, was announced into existence last week. There are seven shows currently included in the project: 99% Invisible, Love + Radio, KCRW’s Strangers, The Truth, Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, Radio Diaries and Fugitive Waves. More shows will be added over time.
I’m going to listen to as many episodes of each show in Radiotopia as I can. This week, I listened to 20 episodes of Love+Radio — nearly two seasons’ worth. Their most recent episode is “The Superchat.” You can listen to Love+Radio on iTunes and Stitcher, and find out more about it here.
I had to piss my pants in front of my friends. -Elimination (episode 8)
Love+Radio is incredibly hard to listen to.
I don’t mean that it’s bad, poorly produced, awkward, or any of the common insults you could throw at public radio productions that are “hard to listen to”. I mean literally that Love+Radio is physically difficult to listen to.
This is a show produced by Nick van der Kolk for WBEZ Chicago. Similar to This American Life, each episode of Love+Radio is built around a specific theme. Each story, such as it is, complements, subverts or completely ignores the theme. The Story is not sacrificed for cohesiveness.
This show is notable for its lack of narrator. Every once in a while, a producer (or the producer, whichever the case may be) can be heard talking to an interviewee, but that is almost like an outtake — not a main feature. This podcast doesn’t need a gatekeeper telling the listener what’s happening.
And really, that’s the best part of Love+Radio. It’s not a radio program. It’s a conversation, an experiment. Its status as an alt.NPR show, then, is justified — there’s nothing this show won’t (or can’t) do.
But I must reiterate: This show is really, really hard to listen to.
In the episode, “Insane vs. Unsane,” for instance, van der Kolk alternates between a monologue recorded by a self-described crazy person, an interview with a psychiatrist who watched the rise and fall of a major mental institution, and a story of love — taken much, much, much, much, much, much, much too far. The monologue opened and closed the episode, and while I was initially incredibly creeped out by it, the ending made me smile, and laugh out loud several times as I raced down the freeway coming home from work.
There was the episode “How I Found Out My Relationship Had No Future,” where a producer drunk-calls an ex-boyfriend and the exchange ends in a death threat; another that details that one time a drunk guy not only ripped his pinky off by accident, but the entire connective tendon that binds your pinky to your elbow; lots of shows about sex; and on and on.
There’s a reason Love+Radio is the only public radio show with an explicit tag on iTunes. It’s well-deserved, and well worth listening to.