Arrested Development Season 4: The Return

A long, long time ago (back in August 2010, you guys, who can even remember that far back?) I wrote a post about the cancellation of Arrested Development where I made some pretty shocking statements.  I love AD, I seriously love it; it's magical and quirky and fast and witty and very nearly as close to perfect as 22-minute blocks of comedy have ever been.  But, I pondered that, by the end of the series, it was too inside-jokey and too self-referential to ever allow new viewers to jump on board.  Indeed, if you missed a minute -- much less an episode! -- you might miss the genesis of an intricate, layered long-form joke, repeatedly revisited to your perplexity. (On the necessity of watching all of the episodes in strict order, creator Mitch Hurwitz apologized, "turns out I was not successful in creating a form where the setup follows the punch line.")  Indeed, it's a frantic, meandering, "over your head" type of show, which is why it has garnered such an infatuated, culty following of repeat viewers, but it's also why it had struggled to exist on pre-DVR network television.

With its inside jokes and its crazy momentum (didn't the whole show always feel like it was spiraling ever faster, its pace quickening like the third act of a French bedroom farce, destined to end with a smash of actors in disguises running out of slamming doors?), I worried that Arrested Development just couldn't sustain itself for much longer without sacrificing its faultless, endlessly quippy quality.  I worried that fans would lobby to bring it back, only to have it tailspin in an over-hyped cable season of compromised comedy, too-high expectations, and inability to jump back on board (pun -- see series finale!) where they left off.  With a show that moved so fast and ended neatly and abruptly, I worried that starting back for a single season would feel less like an epilogue and more like chasing after a moving car full of people you used to love, never quite able to hop on.

So, with Arrested Development: Season 4 premiering THIS SUNDAY, I thought I'd reevaluate my concerns: I think this just might actually work.  The reason  it might, to the delight of all of us, is the thing that none of us saw coming back in 2006: Netflix original programming.  The idea that Netflix (and Hulu, and other independent subscription services) could produce and develop original shows based on more sensitive metrics of smaller pools of audience demand just wasn't feasible at the close of Arrested Development; we all relied on networks and Nielsen ratings and broadcasters whose goal was to sell the most ads to the broadest, blandest audience.   The landscape of television, and how we watch television, has changed so dramatically even in the seven or so years since AD has been off the air, and it has morphed into an environment that's ripe and supportive of exactly the type of viewing best suited to AD: the binge and repeat.  Netflix is nothing if not King of the couchathon.  (Though Hurwtiz does caution viewers not to completely overindulge; with a show this rich and crammed full of jokes, watching the whole series in one sitting risks undermining the humor by pure over-saturation)  Where AD failed at piecemeal, disjointed, once-per-week (and often unreliably weekly) broadcasting to a wide, sometimes unfamiliar, unwilling, confused audience, I believe AD will thrive brilliantly in its new tapered, targeted, instantly-gratifying streaming home on Netflix.  I think the Bluths may have finally found their nerdy, needy niche.

In these last remaining Bluthless hours, you guys can  watch the trailer, take the Superfan Quiz, and tell me how you're feeling about the premiere:

Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square

So, I have this whole gun control/economics post I've been laboring on, but I scrapped it to bring  you something way, WAY more important.

If any of you knew me between 7th and 9th grade and also now as an adult with no excuse for myself, I adore Newsies.  I'd characterize my middle school love for Newsies as an "obsession," except it doesn't quite do justice to how extreme and all-encompassing of a mania I had.  Now, it's been years since I dabbled in the bizarre, culty teenage-girl underground that is true Newsies fandom, but about a week ago I got "King of New York" stuck in my head and just couldn't get it out.  So, as any self-respecting adult attorney person with real friends would do, I dug out my Newsies cast album (from the film not the MUSICAL which changes all the damn LYRICS) and had myself a listen.

Well, my husband caught me, and it actually turned out pretty poorly for him: we revisited a conversation that I'd let slide/blocked out/repressed many years ago during our early courtship when he told me he'd never seen Newsies.  (Allowing this injustice to persist uncorrected for so many years is a testament to my mounting maturity and also 'cause my husband is super hot, y'all.)  Unfortunately for him, I own the DVD (though, truth be told, I prefer my vintage VHS that I taped off of The Disney Channel back in the '90s), and we sat down and Andrew drank a whole, whole lot and lovingly watched it.

DINOSAUR!!! Because now all my favorite things are here!!

And, while of course it's cheesier and sillier and sappier and more melodramatic and ridiculous through the lens of adulthood, a lot of my opinions about Newsies remain unchanged.  (After all -- didn't we all know how cheesy and unrealistic it was when we watched it in middle school? We just loved it anyway!)  Today, I still love the things about it I loved when I was 14 -- the rousing dance numbers, Christian Bale dance-riding a fake horse, Bill Pullman saving the day, that one shot where you can see one of the Brooklyn guys' junk as he climbs out of the water -- and I still stand by my criticisms: it's too long (over 2 hours!), the whole Ann Margaret storyline blows, and it was mismarketed as a kid movie instead of being aimed at its true target audience, preteen girls. I thought about writing a whole post with my changed impressions of the movie, but those are pretty much it. (Other than noticing like a whole ton of super gay subtext this time around.  Like all the newsies are pretty gay for each other.  And David and Bill Pullman are totally gay together. And Snyder is way gay for Jack, but I think Jack's pretty gay for David, which is hard. That's the real story line.)

(Who you calling gay?)

Anyway, THE POINT OF THIS POST is that while Rotten-Tomatoes-ing during my re-watch, I found something else that came up when I searched Newsies.  It's called "Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square," and it is a "25 minute, homemade, newsies horror-film spoof, was made in 1991 on the back lot of Universal Studios during the shooting of the movie Newsies."  WHAT? WHAT?!?!?!?  It was written, directed, produced by, and stars the Newsies actors (including Mark David [aka "Specs"] playing Don Knotts -- again I say to you WHAT?!?!?!?!), and it is a HORROR MOVIE.  This is literally the greatest thing ever, and I am just so, so glad that my AOL dial-up connection in 1999 did not allow me to find this on the internets because I WOULD HAVE EXPLODED AND DIED and my parents would've watched my "Newsies" VHS in mourning and when the tape got wonky they would've found out how much I used to rewind and pause the movie on that one Brooklyn guys' junk shot.  In other words: it would've been a disaster.

But now, from the fortress of Adulthood and Real Friends, I was able to watch "Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square," that great adverbial horror movie, without fear.  (But also, I still kind of exploded with happiness. Only now I have a blog to channel it into and not my Newsies newsletter.  P.S. that happened. )  So, now I get to bring all of my Boomstickers this insane awesomeness for your enjoyment. Warning, it may be NSFWWE (Not Safe for Watching Without Exploding).

 

Crazy Betches and Internet Consequences

I'll bookend this month of April with another post about a college-age young woman who has sparked a great deal of controversy on the internets.  Earlier this month, I talked about Suzy Lee Weiss, the misguided teenage satirist whose Wall Street Journal piece about not getting into college because she wasn't either a minority or a prodigy earned her some scathing comments and nasty Gawker ridicule.  Indeed, in the weeks following my post, Suzy has been the target of some robust criticism from her peers, though she's earned a smattering of a lukewarm defenders, like the Yale Daily News and me.  (And at least one passionate defender -- see my super smart, literary friend Amy in the last article's comments.)

I, for one, concluded that Suzy probably isn't worse than anyone else her age in her position, but what sucks for Suzy is that her airing of white-bred grievances is now public property that will follow her forever.  Thank goodness, I exclaimed, wiping my brow, that none of my teenage musings made it outside of AOL chatrooms and some angsty poetry and bits of notebook paper stuffed in lockers. Otherwise there's a good chance this blog would be entirely Blink 182-themed.

At least Suzy made the conscious decision to author a public piece -- she had time to edit, reword, and rewrite; she prepared for a widespread audience and almost certainly benefited from some professional revisions (her sister is a WSJ reporter, surprise, surprise).  Suzy, however impeded by youth and poor judgment, at least had conscious control over the image she chose to project to her readers.

Unlike poor Rebecca Martinson, known less by her name than by her coinage of the instantly-iconic rhyming threat "c*%t punt."  Ah, now you know who I'm talking about.  Yes, poor Rebecca Martinson, the Delta Gamma sister behind one the most profane and -- unfortunately for her -- most instantly, widely, redefiningly viral emails of all time.  Through a still-unconfirmed leak, Martinson's four-letter rant to her pledge sisters was featured on Gawker on April 18.  Since then, the letter has been referenced on network news, lampooned by The Daily Show, immortalized in dozens of memes, and given dramatic life by comedian Alison Haislip, Real Housewife of Orange County Tamara Barney, and most miraculously, Michael Shannon of Boardwalk Empire fame:

Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter from Michael Shannon

Following this unwitting thrust into the spotlight, Martinson was forced to resign from her sorority and was sanctimoniously censured on Delta Gamma's official website. (Love how the screenshot includes an advertisement for an in-house attorney! See below.) She was offered a job out of the scandal -- but it was with an online "adult" company.  Look, this email thing may not "ruin her life," but it may follow her for a long time, and, regardless of her ability to move on, Rebecca probably feels like her life is ruined right about now.

Click to enlarge! (That's what she said? What? Move on.)

So it begs all sorts of questions, doesn't it, about the ethics of what Gawker (and its comprades) are doing?  On one hand, this email was super entertaining to all of us looking in from the outside (I mean, Jon Stewart even thought it was entertaining!), and since entertainment is Gawker's business, by that measure, this email was a booming success.  On the other hand, Gawker flippantly ignored, and in fact, published,  a really reasonable request by the DG chapter president to remove the names of the sorority and fraternity at issue in their article.  And, though originally published anonymously, it wasn't very long before Martinson's identity was revealed on a massive scale.  When the email went viral, Martinson's Facebook and Twitter sites were exposed and she was forced to delete all social media accounts.  And, y'all, it's one thing to quit your sorority, but making a college kid Facebook is an unfathomably devastating punishment.

Reasonable anonymity request that Gawker PUBLISHED.

By no means is Martinson the first Gawker causality; just recently Gawker posted a whole bunch of actual student essays from admitted Columbia University students and mercilessly ridiculed them.  Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post wrote of the expose: 

"It’s not that [the admissions essays] are particularly mockable on their own, although some of them are (“All week as I looked at the Drum Circle, waiting for the Flag Ceremony to begin”). It’s that they remind us of how we used to sound. . . . Most of us experience a moment of revulsion, the moment when That Brilliant Story I Wrote That Should Be In The New Yorker, Like, Six Times turns into cringeworthy juvenilia."

Dear sweet Jesus Christ on a cracker am I grateful that none of my horrible, pretentious college essays are circulating around the internets!  Shouldn't adolescents be allowed to suffer through some of their adolescent assholedom privately?  Of course, the wide berth of the internet has let plenty of adult people ruin their own lives with tasteless, if harmless, posts, without Gawker's help (and sometimes even with Gawker's defense!)  But for those of us who still curse a lot and make weird jokes and generally toe the line of poor taste, it makes the internet a perpetually dangerous place to share thoughts (and certainly photos). 

So, this all boils down to some kind of a privacy argument, right?  I talked a few posts ago about the difference between people who put themselves in the "public light" versus plain old un-famous folks and the fact that the latter are reasonably entitled to expect more privacy than the former.  So here we have two major, fundamental rights at play: the Right to Free Speech and the Right to Privacy, and maybe also the lesser Right of Teenagers to be Idiots.  And we have this girl who's as much of an idiot as many of us were at 19 or 21, with a slightly better mastery of profanity and diatribes and pointed female violence, who has the reasonable expectation that she can freely say some rude, horrible, hate-filled stuff to a very, very specific audience.  And then that audience blows up, and then -- unlike Gawker's bridezilla whose email seemed far less forgivable to me -- her real name is all over the place, and her photos, and all of the sudden by virtue of this private thing she is in the public light.

So, in this age, what expectation should we -- any of us -- have that something we write is going to be disseminated only to its select audiences?   We've all been victims at least once of sending a text to the wrong person, or the dreaded accidental "Reply All."  But what if you accidentally "Reply All" the whole country, y'all?!   That's what Rebecca Martinson did!  Can't we all feel some core sympathy for her dumb adolescence and her unintended fame, because -- minus her email's "Mametesque exuberance" and perfect mastery of malediction -- didn't we all write bunch of shit in college that we're ashamed of?

And yet, here I am, out of high school, out of college, trying pretty hard to be a reformed pretentious jerk, but I'm still writing this blog, volunteering my silly thoughts to friends and internet strangers.  I also still have pictures on my Facebook of me wearing a side-ponytail and a stuffed Ocelot.  (Yes, wearing the Ocelot.)  And those pictures are from last weekend.  So, I guess what I'm saying is I'm not a very fast learner, and I will c&%# punt all of you if tell me to take them down.

"To All the Satire Websites Who Admonished Me" - the Suzy Lee Weiss Story

This scathing Gawker article called "Attention Students: ‘Just Being Yourself’ Isn’t a Skill That Should Earn You Admission to College," was just brought to my attention.  It -- in it's perfect, snarky, poignant Gawker way -- skewers a real-life high school senior named Suzy Lee Weiss who wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal called "To (All) the Colleges that Rejected Me," bemoaning her rejection from, it appears, more than one college.

Y'all, Cher gave her skis to the homeless!

Gawker calls the op-ed: "a good old fashioned spiteful rant, flinging glasses of white whine into the eyes, not only of every college that denied her admission, but also every person who has ever been accepted into a college, ever."  Gawker then goes on to pick apart, line by line, Suzy's rude, entitled grousing about how she was "lied to" by nameless admissions officers who told her that she would be golden for the Ivies if she would "just be herself."  To which Gawker responds:

"Being yourself is not a talent. If you worked two full-time jobs all the way through high school and one of them was "being yourself" and the other was "trying your best," you actually worked zero full-time jobs."  

Gawker points out all the pathetic privilege inherent in the piece and their review leaves you with a funny taste in your mouth, like Crest White Strips mixed with Smirnoff Ice and an errant waft of fake tanner -- you know, the smell of rich, bored high school kids.

Well, one of you got into college.

But then I went back and read the original op-ed, and, while Suzy still comes off as somewhat spoiled and lazy, the piece itself is really a sort of misguided attempt at self-mockery.  Suzy is more self-aware than Gawker gives her credit for: she gets that she didn't get into college because she didn't work hard enough; she gets that she didn't commit to unique extracurriculars and charity work and resume-building over the summers when all the Ivy-League "tiger cubs" did.  She blames her family's relaxed parenting in a tongue-in-cheek way for her failures (though she blames her lack of "diversity" in a conspicuously less tongue-in-cheek way...). She ends the piece with a funny little self-reflective line:

"To those claiming that I am bitter—you bet I am! An underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures? That too! To those of you disgusted by this, shocked that I take for granted the wonderful gifts I have been afforded, I say shhhh—'The Real Housewives' is on."

Cute, right? She gets it, right?  What's unfortunate about this piece is either that Suzy's limited writing prowess couldn't make her satire fully stand out from her sincerity, or that Suzy herself isn't quite sure what she's holding up to be mocked and what she's genuinely bitter about.  And what worries me is that this teenager made some privileged, controversial, immature, vaguely racist statements on a very public forum that are all but guaranteed to bite her in the ass for the rest of her life.

College girl SICK over difficult admissions process.

Imagine the kind of bullshit you said when you were 18, freshly rejected from your dream college, acknowledging -- but not fully comprehending -- that other people have "real" problems and you shouldn't complain but nonetheless feeling pretty crushed and ashamed and embarrassed and a little deceived because didn't Jessica get into college last year and she's an idiot and a slut?  And now imagine all of your bitter AIM chats being published in a major news publication and lambasted by a professional writer on that same internet.  Because, if the occasional deep breaths I have to take before I publish anything remotely controversial on my not-very-popular blog are any indication, the backlash is going to suck.

Another unfortunate part of this is that Suzy's piece left untouched a bigger, hovering issue that lends some legitimacy to her juvenile complaints: should we be concerned about the ever-increasing competition to access higher-education? Sometimes referred to as "credential inflation," i.e., the decreasing value of ever-higher degrees (it wasn't so very long ago when the majority of the work force only had a high-school diploma), the fact that applicants are increasingly qualified means that it takes that much more on your resume to even be part of the applicant pool.  Just last year writer Katherine Ozment posited that the insane competition for colleges has the potential to "ruin childhood," and advocated exactly what Suzy seems to excel at: chilling out a little.

Lifting herself up out of poverty was good practice.

If Suzy's grades were good enough, she might consider herself part of a new niche called "unhooked white girls."   That term was coined last admissions season to describe white girls with top grades and SAT scores who nonetheless faced rejection because they didn't have a notable "hook:" excelling at a sport or instrument, overcoming adverse socio-economic circumstances, or, presumably, starting a (non-fake) charity.  Basically, a "hook" is the crude but widely-accepted term for exactly the type of activities Suzy bemoans not being advised to take up.  And don't just take it from Suzy; take it from Scott Farber, president of A-List education, who told The Daily Beast the "hook" exists

"Because there are so many high-achieving … girls who have studied hard, participated in all the right activities, and expected the top colleges to appreciate their efforts. . . .Do they deserve to get in? Sure. Would they do well if admitted? Absolutely. But colleges are not looking for the well-rounded kid; they want the well-rounded class. And unless you are a superstar in some area, you’re just one of thousands of smart, all-around, but unhooked white girls. It may be unfair, but that’s life.”

So, Suzy's plight may actually be real and sad and indicative of larger problems this county may be facing with regard to education and debt and privilege and class.   But, admittedly, her approach left this analysis untouched, and something to be desired.  I, for one, remain thrilled that nothing I wrote at 18 is readable on the internet.  And I can't wait to see Gawker run rampant with the phrase "unhooked white girls," because I'm thinking it'd be a great "Snooki and JWoWW" spin-off.

Flicky Friday (ft. Breaking Bad 1995)

I like to think that this little slice of internet genius is exactly the kind of project I would wholeheartedly devote myself to were I to find myself unemployed.  I could spend hours making a coy, sassy little video like this.  And then many, many more hours writing spec scripts for the show that goes with it.  Enjoy:

"In an alternate universe, Breaking Bad aired as a network family drama in 1995. Here's the intro."

Hathahaters Part 2: The Female Phenomenon of Hating Women We Don't Know

Last week I wrote an article about how hating Anne Hathaway is super in vogue right now.  She may have a little gold man (AND an Oscar -- take that, unknown husband Adam Shulman whose name I had to Google! Ha ha!), but she's also culled a base of detractors so vocal and notable that they've earned their own catchy monicker: "Hathahaters."  Indeed, the internet has been rampant with indictments of -- followed by defenses of, followed by indictments of the defenses of -- Hathaway in the weeks surrounding her first Oscar win.

I found this picture on Google.

In addition to the articles I discussed Sunday night,  CNN chronicled the backlash thusly:

Google "Anne Hathaway" and "hate," and the evidence is overwhelming. Link after link highlights the great American pastime (though it may actually be international, but more on that later) of being annoyed by the Oscar-winning actress. It's clear from the abundance of articles and negative comments that some people don't even want to see her face.

CNN then went on to interview a psychology professor who hypothesized that we hate Anne Hathaway because in an improving economic climate we want to see actresses with rounder faces, because it's CNN and so of course they did. (What?!?)  But as numerous as the detractors have been, Anne has received some credentialed media support.  Anderson Cooper came to her defense on his show.  The Huffington Post's Douglas Anthony Cooper stood up for Anne in a sarcastically-titled article, "Anne Hathaway: The Most Horrible Person Who's Ever Lived" where exposed the truth behind some unsourced anti-Anne comments attributed to co-celebrities, and assaulted America's love-affair with the "awk" Jennifer Lawrence, reigning queen of the "Age of the Unpolished."  Sasha Weiss of The New Yorker defended her talent and her energy and her eagerness, saying "Would it really be so terrible to give her the applause that she craves?"   Slate's Forrest Wickman called our hatred sexism and compared rampant criticism of Anne to the seeming dearth of criticism about Les Mis co-star Hugh Jackman.  And excellent Ann Friedman at New York Magazine wrote almost exactly the post I'd planned to write called, "Why Do Women Hate Hathaway but Love Lawrence," with acuity and eloquence and alliteration and all. 

So, since Friedman perfectly covered that ground, I thought I'd talk a little bit about how all of this taps into the larger cultural willingness of women to hate other women we don't know.  To some extent this is true of all celebrities and politicians -- we all have lots of opinions about lots of people we've never met --  but I'm going to talk specifically about how it happens to women because I am one and it's my blog, and also because I feel that female-on-female hatred is more vociferous and more visceral.

Now, I'm not going to broach the whole "frenemies" concept -- that is to say, the uniquely female social conundrum of hating people that you know and choose to spend time with.  What I want to talk about is our willingness to have extreme, negative opinions about women whom we've never met.  Last week, I admitted I felt the same annoyance with and dislike of Anne Hathaway that apparently the entire universe shares.  There are some legitimate, objective observations from which this annoyance stems, and of course I'm "entitled to my opinion" (such a favorite privileged American phrase!), but when we step back and evaluate it: my judgment of Anne is derived entirely from short, stressful soundbites and a body of work that is, by definition, "acting."  That makes my opinion is pretty circumstantial and unfounded, right?

I started thinking about this more because not long ago I was on the other side of this kind of obscure hatred-from-a-distance brand of contempt. Recently -- though certainly not for the first time in my life -- I was told by a well-meaning friend that a loose, casual acquaintance of mine absolutely despised me.  This woman was a former schoolmate with whom I'd shared a few large lecture halls but never a conversation.  We were classmates, not friends, and frankly I'd never given her much thought.  But, without knowing it, I had apparently caused her to draw some intense, adverse conclusions about me, enough that when fed the innocuous question "what do you think about Alison?" she didn't mince words. 

Her disdain really, really bothered me.  I couldn't get over it, I couldn't shrug it off (obviously, as I'm writing this damn post about it now).  I spent days mulling it over; I squeezed my eyes shut and tried desperately to picture any and every interaction we'd ever had to see what faux pas I'd committed to offend her.  This was difficult because a) I don't think we interacted many times, b) I drink a lot, c) offensive things just tumble out of my mouth even when I'm sober, which, again d) is infrequent.  But the idea that someone I barely knew spent time thinking and talking and mocking and hating me really got under my skin.  I give the people who know me enough reason to dislike me; I don't need to worry about being hated by people I don't know!

So I tried to imagine that sad, pathetic, insulted, bewildered, self-doubting feeling on a blown-up scale, on a national level, where a random, mean girl didn't just make passive-agressive comments to a mutual friend, but instead created a Twitter account parodying my nipples. Where instead of one girl rolling her eyes at my onslaught of unfunny facebook posts, it's thousands -- thousands -- of people uniting across social media under the banner of Alison-Abhorrers (I was going to do the alliteration with my last name but it starts with a "C" and the only angry "C" word I could think of was a really bad one.)  It made me feel really guilty and really bad for Anne and every famous lady whose popularity peaks, then plummets, and whose every wardrobe slip and breakup is aired out for a world of tweeters to reduce down to judgments and abbreviated, misunderstood commentary.  Why do we find the need to insult and advertise our dislike for people we don't know?  Why do we care about them?

I suppose the simple answer is, "because other people bother us and annoy us and because we're allowed to."  But I think at least part of the answer for famous people is a sort of crude "you're famous so you're asking for it."   And this isn't a flippant, apologist's excuse; it's literally a legally-endorsed concept.  In the law, if someone is considered a "public figure" -- which is really broad and includes almost anyone who "places themselves in the limelight" -- that person can't sue for defamation the same way the rest of us can (they have to prove the person had "actual malice" against them, which ain't easy. Hence: tabloids.).  So, if you're famous or notable, people are pretty much legally allowed to badmouth you and gossip about you.  It's the price of being well-known.

So, I guess it makes sense that Anne's skyrocketing fame would coincide with a spiraling public image.  And I'm guessing that Jennifer Lawrence's (who, for the record, I, like everyone else, absolutely adore and am totally charmed by) upswing will be met by an equal and opposite downswing just like Anne's did and Taylor Swift's did and Kristen Stewart's did and Miley Cyrus' did and every other so-famous-she's-everywhere female of the internet age.  And I'll continue to write scathing See You Next Tuesdays about people who do stuff that I, from my unfamous computer perch, find to be reprehensible and super annoying.  And at the end of the day, I guess the true balance is that they get to console themselves with their Oscars in their Mediterranean mansions and I get to post this on my Facebook and go back to work.

But, like, seriously...Kristen Stewart is awful, right?

Diego's Podcast Corner: Comedy Bang Bang

I love a good Podcast, but sometimes I don't know where to start: these days you can hardly turn on NPR without hearing teasers for a dozen of 'em.  Sometimes it feels like the whole word is just one big Portland garage of indie celeb interviews, niche comedy sketches, and over-stylized science minutes. Luckily for us, a friend of mine, burgeoning comedian, and podcast connoisseur has agreed to be The Boomstick's official guide to the world of Podcasts.  Today I bring you Diego's first recommendation, and a new guest blog:

Diego's Podcast Corner:

"Comedy Bang Bang"

Greetings and salutations my fellow “Boomstickers!"

I feel as if I should begin this guest post by giving a quick background about myself and an explanation as to why perhaps you are hopefully reading my words. My name is Diego. I am 30 years old. And I’m an addict. No, I’m not addicted to drugs, gambling, food or anything “sexy” like that; it’s something much sadder I’m afraid. My addiction is to the entertainment/information wave of the future known as podcasts. Podcasts have become an integral and major part of my life, and it is because of this addiction that I have been asked to share some of my favorite podcasts with you in the hopes of perhaps introducing you to yet another form of media to consume.

Podcasts are everywhere and surely there is one that covers any and every subject matter you might be able to imagine; there's literally something for everyone. Because of this, they've taken over much of my waking life,  replaced my terrestrial radio, and reduced my music consumption (to a degree). Now, I must also preface all by saying that I am an improviser, wannabe standup comic, and lifelong comedy nerd, meaning podcasts relating to the world of comedy are my main cup of tea. But, I will do my best to mix it up and share a wide variety of podcasts I think are great and -- most importantly -- free.

For my first recommendation, however, I'll stick to what I know best and suggest my all time favorite podcast that I've listened to for years. For my money, Comedy Bang Bang is the funniest and most consistent podcast on the internet. Starting out initially in 2009 as Comedy Death-Ray Radio, the show is the cornerstone of the Earwolf podcasting network (home to many other podcasts, which I will hopefully be able to write about in the future.)  Scott Aukerman (comedian and writer for the legendary 1990's HBO series "Mr. Show with Bob and David", starring David Cross ["Arrested Development"] and Bob Odenkirk ["Breaking Bad"]) hosts this weekly podcast, where he invites other comedians, TV stars, movie stars, and musicians to come on and chat as themselves or as characters of their choosing/creation.  Guests have included John Hamm, Sarah Silverman, Paul F. Tompkins, Amy Poehler, Nick Kroll, Jessica St. Clair, Adam Scott, Gillian Jacobs, and many others.

The show is a mix of free-flowing conversation with the guests, improvised riffs, songs and games like “Free Style Rap Battle”, or “Would You Rather."  (The latter is a regularly played game on the show where the guests are given two absurd scenarios they have to ask questions about in order to gain the proper information to cast their vote and try to win the game. Scenarios in the past have included, “Would you rather live in a port-a potty at a music festival, or have your entire body be made out of delicious cheesecake?” Ponder over that for a minute.)

The show has gained such popularity that it has also become a TV show on IFC. Season 2 of the Comedy Bang TV show is set to premier in the Summer of 2013; Season 1 was just added to Netflix streaming, so you guys can catch up in time.  The TV show is great, but obviously limited compared to the podcast in terms of censoring certain discussions and jokes.

You can download Comedy Bang Bang directly from the Earwolf site, you can subscribeon iTunes where all 200+ episodes are available for free download. A new episode of Comedy Bang Bang is released every Monday morning, and sometimes a second episode is released on Thursdays as well.

I highly encourage you to check out Comedy Bang Bang and jump aboard the “bang wagon” with me as it continues to grow and gain notoriety. It's already been touted as one of the best podcasts by Rolling Stone, the A.V. Club, and GQ, to name-drop just a few. If you aren’t well-versed in the comedy scene, I'd suggest picking an episode that has a guest you do know and start there. Of course, you can always pick a random one or just start at the beginning -- you can't lose because they're all great. And unlike Reading Rainbow, please DO take my word for it.