Colin Marshall

Vital stats:
Format: Jeff Garlin talking before a live audience with people he respects and/or people who interest him
Episode duration: 1-2h
Frequency: 2-3 per month

I suppose we must live in the Age of Conversation. Podcasts gave me that impression, and podcasts — the ones I listen to, at least — have given me no reason to deny it. Despite having rejoiced at the seemingly limitless formal possibilities newly opened up by the medium, especially against the seemingly numberless limitations under which many radio programs still labor, I notice that my most memorable podcast listening experiences come from nothing more innovative than people talking to one another. Then again, the least memorable podcasts I’ve heard (to the extent, of course, that I can recall them) also featured nothing more than people talking to one another. Indeed, most podcasts, the enjoyable and the less so, need nothing more than a few microphones and enough people to speak into them. Out of this easiest of all configurations comes, it seems, podcasting’s both highest and lowest moments. Into this peaceable ring of extremity Jeff Garlin dares to throw his hat with his very own conversation podcast, By the Way, in Conversation with Jeff Garlin [RSS] [iTunes].

We must here define a subgenre: within the bounds of the conversation podcast, we have the more specialized celebrity conversation podcast, in which a certain celebrity, presumably feeling they can hold, in their own personae, conversations of interest to audiences wider than those actually at their dinner parties, hold them and turn them into MP3 files. Sometimes this assumption works out; sometimes it doesn’t. Alec Baldwin’s Here’s the Thing stands out in my mind as a particularly successful example of recent years, though he takes the strategy (with assistance from WNYC) of making the proceedings sound as public radio-y as possible. Conan O’Brien’s Charlie Rose homage Serious Jibber-Jabber strikes me as ranking in a similar league, despite appearing only as videos, and sporadically at that. Garlin goes the route of maximum rawness, recording in front of a live audience at Los Angeles’ Largo — a place I tend inexplicably to conflate with Los Angeles’ Spago — and cutting out, apparently, only what absolutely needs currently out. But he has taken this on as a mission: a mission, he says, set against the highly produced, thoroughly pre-interviewed, rigorously edited interview programs so prevalent today. I can sign on to that.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.