The Totally Rad Show

» see thetotallyradshow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The last episode is an hour and three minutes long and it is numbered 760. It went out on 26 November 2012 under a title with no joke in it at all, "The Totally Rad Show - Final Episode". The two before it were a Thanksgiving clip show and a final top ten. A week earlier, on 19 November, the hosts had used an episode called "A Look Back" to tell the audience the end was coming.

It began on 27 March 2007 as a weekly video podcast on Revision3, the network Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson built to put niche shows on a schedule. Alex Albrecht was already doing Diggnation there. Jeff Cannata and Dan Trachtenberg sat down beside him, and the week's hour was given over to whatever was opening at the cinema and whatever was shipping on consoles. Wired wrote it up that May as the network growing up.

The production was a garage. Everything except the location shoots was filmed against a green screen at Albrecht's house, with the backgrounds, trailers and box art keyed in behind the three of them afterward. The first 104 episodes opened with a re-enactment of some film scene, starting with a Raiders of the Lost Ark parody built out of a can of whipped cream and an American Idol DVD. Steve Koncelik shot and cut everything through episode 103. Mike Gaines took the camera from episode 104 and stayed off screen, though his voice turns up in the recordings often enough.

In 2008 it took a People's Voice Webby and a Podcast Award for best production. At PAX in 2010 the hosts announced the show was going daily, and the first weekday episode landed on 20 September 2010 with a review of The Town. That was episode 183. The remaining 577 arrived in a little over two years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the release calendar it ran on ~

A daily show about what opened on Friday is a show about somebody's Friday. The films it reviewed were in American cinemas that weekend, the games were on American release dates, and the whole hour assumed you were living inside that calendar and had an hour a day spare to hear three men argue about it. What I knew about a film turned up as a forum thread some days after it opened, and a show pegged to Friday is no use to somebody reading about Friday on Tuesday.

There is also the small matter of a gigabyte of video a day in 2010. The show published in high definition because it could, and because its audience was on American cable broadband. On TTNet that was not a subscription, it was a decision.

~ five months after the sale ~

Discovery Communications bought Revision3 on 1 June 2012, reported at around thirty million dollars. The Totally Rad Show ended on 26 November. Nobody at the time blamed the sale, and the hosts framed the ending as theirs, which it appears to have been. The record holds the order of the two events and nothing about the reasons. The gap between them is five months and twenty-five days.

~ where the three of them went ~

Trachtenberg had already made a Portal fan short in 2011 that got him noticed. He directed 10 Cloverfield Lane in 2016 and Prey in 2022. Albrecht kept hosting; Cannata stayed in podcasting. On 27 March 2017, a decade after episode one, the three of them sat down together again and put the reunion on YouTube.

Three weeks after the finale, the Revision3 show page was still describing the release schedule in the present tense: "New episodes: Weekdays". It is in the archive that way, under a list of 254 pages of episodes. Today thetotallyradshow.com still answers, with a redirect to revision3.com, which does not resolve at all.

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