Avid listeners of The Spin-off may have noticed that it's been a hot minute since we recorded our last episode. We haven't forgotten about you -- promise. But you may have been wondering if something was up.
The short answer is yes.
When we first started The Spin-off almost four years ago in 2013 both television and podcasting were different than they are now. We were still a couple years away from the phrase "Peak TV," and original TV shows on Netflix -- not to mention Amazon and Hulu -- were the outliers, not the norm.
The podcast boom was still in its infancy. This show was literally a spin-off from the KCRW radio show The Business.
At the time, it made sense to get together about once a month and talk about TV news and development trends that The Business didn't have time to cover in-depth.
Over the course of more and more episodes, The Spin-off evolved into its own thing. And it grew to include interviews with writers, showrunners, actors, as well as people you don't typically get to hear from -- like network schedulers -- including the infamous "Masked Scheduler" Preston Beckman.
If you missed our conversations with people like Betsy Beers, Julie Plec, Jerrod Carmichael, Noah Hawley, and Rick Ludwin -- an icon in the industry who oversaw late night at NBC for more than 30 years -- they're still available -- and worth a listen!
That's all to say, it's time for The Spin-off to change again. We're still working on specifics, but the goal is to bring you shorter episodes, more often. This way, our conversations can be more current, and we can talk about more TV -- because as you know -- there's an awful lot of it.
But, we didn't want to bid farewell to the classic Spin-off format without doing one final, bittersweet episode. And we thought we could use it to reflect on how the very definition of what makes a TV show has changed just in the past couple of years, and look forward to what TV might become.
End of show Downloads:
Diane: Season 2 of Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang's Master of None on Netflix is the best TV series in recent memory for Diane. The episodes are beautiful and ring true, especially Lena Waithe's Thanksgiving episode.
Joe: There's another Netflix show that isn't quite as buzzy, but still a ton of fun. F is for Family is an animated comedy based on Bill Burr's childhood in the mid-1970s. Think filthier version of King of the Hill.
Mike: Keep an eye on Sinclair's purchase of Tribune, which would put more than 200 TV stations in the hands of the very conservative Sinclair. In past years, this merger would likely be stopped by the FCC, but under the current administration, the sale is set to go through.