Call For Comments: Is This The Darkest Timeline?

From Mav: It’s 2020, and the world is on fire. We all know how bad things have been. Some of the things are obvious, longterm, and we’ve done shows on them before. Some of them are new: There’s a deadly pandemic that has killed over 213,000 people in the United States (and over a million…

Call for Comments: Pretty Creepy Sexy Baby – Sexualizing Infantilization

From Mav: A few weeks ago, we did a show called “twentysomethingteen” where we talked about the phenomenon of casting fully grown adults as teens in TV shows for practical reasons (they can work longer hours) and the effect that had of creating characters who did not reasonably look like teenagers, especially compared to actual…

e129. Corsets: Enhancement, Imprisonment, Empowerment, & Empresses

The corset might be one of the most fascinating garments in the history of fashion. On one hand, it’s simply underwear. It is a garment that provides a specific function. On the other hand popular culture has made it a symbol forever associated with everything from the Victorian Age to 80s pop music to burlesque…

e128. 9 Popular Culture Pet Peeves We Hate and Why

Pop Culture is a double edges sword. The more we love a certain type of media, the more of it we absorb. But the more we absorb, the more we notice some of the tropes that are frequently repeated. And the more we notice those tropes, the more likely we are to eventually get annoyed…

Call for Comments: Pop Culture Pet Peeves

From Hannah: A long time ago in a reality that now seems far far away, we did an episode on Media Addiction that discussed hate consuming media. We thought through why, exactly, fans continue to still engage with TV/book/comics/film franchises that disappoint them (Star Wars comes to mind). I’ve wondered, in the time since we’ve…

e125. It’s the End of the World as we show it…

It’s 2020 and the world is ending… or maybe it’s not… or maybe it ended months ago and we just can’t tell anymore. Honestly at this point it’s pretty much just impossible to tell. With what seems like one disaster after another shaking the planet, we decided to take a look at apocalypse and disaster…

Call for Comments: It’s the end of the world … no, I don’t feel fine

From Hannah: As we’ve said in just about every blog post and podcast since March, 2020 is a waking nightmare. If Twitter is any indication, a large majority of the U.S. population has gone from joking about it being the end of the world to wishing for that event to occur. Good Omens, this is…

e122. twentysomethingteen

There are a lot of television shows and movies about teenagers, both comedies and dramas.There always have been. And yet, actual teenagers on television are extremely rare. Teens are typically played by twenty-something actors (or older). This is especially the case when it comes to teenagers in shows with a heavy sexual or romantic components…

Call For Comments: Erasing Cultural Activism in 50 Easy Years

From Mav: I ran across an interesting meme on conservative (MAGA) social media the other day. It was a picture of Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the original Woodstock that was being used to complain about athletes kneeling in protest during the national anthem. The text of the meme is what really got…

e121. The Improv Story Game

We’ve had such a long string of super serious shows lately with some very heavy topics that we’ve been wanting to try and do some things that were more fun, laid back and… well, silly! This week is Mav’s birthday, and rather than sit around and discuss any of the dozen ways that the world…