11/02/26 · Podcasts
— The Understudy
Two comedy shows that used to swap guests roughly every month have not swapped one since October. The version circulating is that something was said at a live taping in Melbourne and that everyone in the green room heard it.
I have spoken to two people who were at that taping. Neither remembers anything, which is not proof of anything, but a green-room incident that nobody in the green room recalls is a fairly weak green-room incident.
Here is the duller explanation. One of the two shows moved to a network in the second half of last year. Guest booking on that network does not go through the host any more; it goes through a booking producer who is managing a slate of about a dozen shows and whose job is to spread guests around rather than concentrate them.
A cross-promotional swap between two shows on different networks used to be two people texting. It is now a request that has to be justified to somebody with a spreadsheet, and the honest answer to “why should this guest go on that other show” is usually “because they are friends”, which is not a reason a spreadsheet accepts.
The reason I think this is right and the feud story is wrong: the same thing has happened to that show’s guest overlap with four other podcasts, not one. A feud explains a single broken relationship. A booking process explains all five.
If I am wrong I will say so here. But I would gently suggest that when a long-running friendly arrangement stops at exactly the moment one party changes employer, the employer is the more likely story than the friendship.