Surprisingly Awesome

~ the obituary ~

Gimlet Media launched Surprisingly Awesome on 3 November 2015 with Adam Davidson, who had co-founded Planet Money, and Adam McKay, who had directed Anchorman. The format was a bet between the two of them: one would pick a subject that sounded like nothing at all, and spend twenty five minutes making the other admit it was worth caring about. The first one was mold. Later ones were concrete, then frequent flyer miles.

Both of the original hosts moved on, and the show ended up with Rachel Ward, who had been producing it, with John Hodgman turning up often enough to count as furniture. The numbered run stops at episode 23, The Wedding, on 19 October 2016. On 19 January 2017 an installment titled simply Update went into the feed, which was Ward saying she was moving to another Gimlet project. After that the show did not publish for three months.

What arrived on 12 April 2017 was episode 24, and its title was A Message from Gimlet CEO Alex Blumberg. The description Gimlet attached to it in the feed is eleven words long: a goodbye from Surprisingly Awesome, and hello to Every Little Thing. Gimlet had hired Flora Lichtman away from Science Friday to take the show over and then decided she should have a different one instead. Both halves of that decision were announced in the same recording.

~ the case file ~

~ the premise ~

The best episodes worked because the boring subject turned out to have an argument inside it. Interest rates have a history. Concrete has a chemistry that goes wrong in interesting ways. The hosts were not there to be charming about trivia, they were there to lose a bet in public, which gave the format a stake that most two-person shows never find.

The clearest example is episode 17, flossing, published on 27 July 2016. Nine days later the show put out episode 17.5, Untangling Flossgate 2016, because the evidence base for flossing had collapsed in the news while their episode was still in the feed. A show about overlooked topics got overtaken by one of its own topics inside a fortnight.

This was the middle of the American podcast boom and I was in Ankara, where almost nobody I worked with listened to one. The whole genre was shaped around a commute that happens in a car, with a phone on a dashboard mount, and the Turkish version of that is a dolmuş with somebody else's radio on. The shows did get here, through the apps and some years late, by which point the companies that made them had mostly been bought.

~ what episode 24 was ~

A podcast normally dies by not publishing. The feed thins out and the gap stretches past a year, and at some point you work out that the last episode was the last episode. Gimlet was a venture-funded company with a press operation, and it ended its show the way a company ends a product, with a dated announcement delivered in the format the audience was already subscribed to.

~ the feed afterward ~

Two more things were published to it. On 25 April 2017, thirteen days after the goodbye, an episode of Every Little Thing turned up in the Surprisingly Awesome feed, about where office plants come from. On 6 October 2017 an episode of The Nod followed, in which Eric Eddings told Brittany Luse about the Lo Lifes, the Brooklyn crew who built an identity out of stolen Polo Ralph Lauren.

Both were advertisements. A dead show's subscriber list is the cheapest distribution a network owns, and Gimlet used this one twice before leaving it alone. The feed is still being served from Megaphone today with all 32 items in it, and Apple still lists the show, so the archive has outlived Gimlet's independence by years.

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