Rejected Show Ideas

When I quit Reply All, I think my only goal was to make something as different from that show. I honestly feel like it’s a hard medium to innovate in — audio storytelling requires some pretty bedrock ideas that are very hard to move away from without a show starting to sound hazy and impressionistic. Not necessarily a problem if that’s what you’re going for. The Desert Oracle podcast is basically a stream of consciousness and I love listening to it. But in general, narrative podcasts and chat podcasts require central conceits and then a lot of scaffolding to fit the topic of the episode within that conceit. And as a result, a lot of narrative podcasts sound the same and a lot of chat podcasts sound the same and they are only made distinct by the personalities of the hosts/presenters. So styles evolve over time but there are still core concepts that are hard to leave behind. I think of it like any other medium, but a good example is architecture. Home styles might change over time, but there are principles that keep them standing. So even if they look a lot different from one another, if you tore them down to the studs they would look remarkably similar.

Anyhow, these were some attempts I made to try and make something different that didn’t get made. Since I’m not making them, feel free to use these ideas. If you actually do and become super famous, I expect you to put me on the list at your live shows.

Song Scramble

This was the one I was most excited about for a long time. The concept is you get a band or an artist — let’s say in this case it’s Sabrina Carpenter, and she has to make a song and write lyrics in a style that is completely not hers. Like she has to record a song in the style of Pavement. Listeners would write in lyric and genre ideas, and then the artist would be given some arbitrary amount of time to make the song; 90 minutes or three hours or something. And the whole time, I’m there poking a microphone in their faces going “hey, hows it going! Are you having fun? What’s making it hard right now!” and then at the end of the episode, we listen back to whatever they made and see how they feel about it.

First of all, I fixate on the nature of creation, because there’s so much that feels inspired by someone or something else, but still other stuff where I can’t figure out what inspired it, and it just seems like it popped into the world sui generis. On top of that, every artist works differently. Some write music first and some work backward from lyrics and some others just sit at a computer and start programming music into their computers. Also, I love the idea of putting artists on their back foot by giving them a song or genre they might not be familiar with and making them write a song with such a limited period of time.

The problem with this pitch became pretty evident after trying to get folks to pick it up. First and foremost there’s an issue with copyright - who owns the compositions on the show? Record labels are loathe to let their artists produce music for other companies, so that itself is a little thorny. I thought it’d be fine to give the record labels the songwriting and publishing rights if we could get a license to use it in the episode in which it was created in perpetuity, but most big artists are captured by big, difficult, lumbering record labels that are incredibly copyright happy. How many times have you heard a story about a YouTube channel being shut down or someone being sued for copyright by a record label, only to have the artist come out and say “hey we had nothing to do with this”? I can think of at least one off the top of my head, and found many more in my research.

The other problem is just that musicians take themselves seriously! And want to get paid for their work! It takes a special musician, especially a famous one, to give up half their day making music that might actually sound pretty awful and then give it away to some dumb podcast. It was a tough sell all around. So unsurprisingly it didn’t sell. I still believe in it though. I also think it’d be fun to do as a live show. Can you imagine going to see The Butthole Surfers, but instead of their normal psych shit, they have to do a 60’s soul ballad in 90 minutes? Man, now I wanna do it again.

The Twitter Podcast

If you are a consumer of the same kind of media I am, then you probably know that tech companies hate talking to the press. I did a tech podcast for the better part of a decade and of the big 5 tech companies, I think I got YouTube to go on the record once. Spotify wouldn’t even talk to us, and they owned our show. But when Elon Musk took over twitter, that ship was leaking. People were eager, desperate to talk about the way the wheels were coming off that particular vehicle, and I desperately wanted to take advantage of that. There was plenty of great reporting about Twitter at the time, but it was usually just in the form of dispatches coming thrice weekly from places like The New York Times, and they weren’t being threaded into a narrative. The narrative was there though — a wealthy man with incredible antipathy toward the press and toward being told what to do takes control of the platform where all the journalists hang out. There was a lot in that story about not just Twitter itself but the way Silicon Valley’s boom era was running out of gas and the desperation with which they pursued other revenue streams. It was a rich vein worth mining.

Unfortunately, it was a story that needed to be told with speed and agility, and the folks with money were like “I think we can spin this up six months down the line!” and by that time it felt stale and not worth telling, so that one ended up in the dustbin. I hope someone is still working on a narrative of the Elon Musk takeover of twitter, because it’s worth studying. It has been one very intense tentpole in the culture war, and as it continues to move ever rightward (currently your account can have its reach limited if you use the word “cis”) I still think there’s a compelling narrative there, especially for someone who has access to Elon himself, though very few people who aren’t sychophants do. Maybe someday.

Oops! I Got Sued!

I love learning about the legal system. And civil law is probably the most fascinating to me. It can be used as a way to seek justice for wrongdoing and it can be used as a bludgeon to silence people. It is this multifaceted and incredibly nuanced part of law that tries to assign monetary values to material wrongs. As someone who was run over by a car and received a settlement for it, the whole process, while being extraordinarily unpleasant, was also incredibly fascinating.

So my plan was to do something flagrant enough every season to get sued and then use that lawsuit as a way to discuss that area of law. First season I wanted to make a Mickey Mouse cartoon and then go through the lawsuit process with Disney to learn more about copyright law. Second season I wanted to get sued by my landlord for failing to pay rent and then use that to learn about tenants rights and housing laws. You get the idea.

You will be shocked to learn that people aren’t particularly warm to the idea of helping pay for a lawsuit against Disney. Also, the longer I did this show, the worse it would probably be for my wallet and for my credit score. But dammit, it’s such a fun idea. Maybe I should figure out a way to get access to Elon Musk so he can bankroll this idea.

Horror Anthology

I know that such a thing already exists, The Magnus Archive being a prime example. But my idea was to get prominent horror writers to come up with scripts and then have like a repertory theater situation going on where it was acted out every week. Or even extend a story for an entire season. I just love horror and I think that audio horror is pretty hard to do and hasn’t been done nearly enough. Alas, everyone thought this one was too expensive too.

I do have this great outline for a bunch of kids who work in a food court at a mall and decide to celebrate a mass quitting by hiding in the mall until after close, only to get picked off one by one by some kind of creature that had been created by the chemical byproducts of the restaurants at which they work. Still wanna make this one.

I think those were the major ideas. If I think of any more, I’ll be sure to include them in future newsletters.

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Just a reminder that I’m working on a new podcast where I solve listener problems. If you have a problem that you’d like help with, please email me at hyperfixedpod.com. The more personal the problem is to you, the better. “How do you make bluetooth work” isn’t all that interesting to me, but “I love passionfruit and have no idea how to get it in the united states” is a good one. If you have any problems you’d like help with, please shoot me an email at hyperfixedpod@gmail.com.

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No jambox this week because I haven’t been listening to enough new music, but soon. I promise. In the meantime, just listen to Deep Gully by the Outlaw Blues Band on repeat. Talk to ya soon.