@midnight video clips
Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air (The Ringer): How do you follow up stepping into Stephen Colbert’s shoes - and finding that they don’t quite fit? You start a podcast. It’s a problem that I hope will be resolved as their rapport gets better and better. Of the three episodes released so far, my only complaint is that the pace of conversation tends to move along too quickly, leaving deeper conversational depths sorely unexplored. Both have deep ties to the so-called Music Television Network and offer entertaining and illuminating anecdotes accordingly. Hosts Holmes, a runner up in MTV’s Wanna Be a VJ contest, and Doughty, former lead singer of two-hit wonder Soul Coughing, are an inspired pairing as hosts. The first season of MTV’s proto-reality show, which premiered in 1992, established the tightly produced formula for unscripted success that’s been the blueprint for literally everything that’s come after, so going back and excavating the show from its foundations on up is certainly enjoyable from a culture-vulture perspective. But when the show in question is old-school seasons of The Real World, and the hosts are Dave Holmes and Mike Doughty, you’ll have to pardon if I get all “only '80s kids will understand” here. Truu Stowray (Feral): The “recap” podcast format is far from a new idea and usually not something worth getting super excited about. They’re 10 episodes in as I type this, and each installment surely holds some new revelation for the steadily expanding ranks of hip comedy foodies. To be honest, though, the potential of someone like Aziz Ansari or Anthony Bourdain stopping by seems too on-the-nose for Miller and Hess, who seem more than happy to embrace the talented but under-exposed fringes of their worlds. Their offbeat guest list so far has pulled evenly from either side of their chosen profession, but they have yet to land any white whales. Miller, the executive chef at LA’s The Wallace, and Hess, a standup with a list of credits that include MTV, VICE, and TruTV, have an incredible chemistry and always manage to make even the deepest of nitty-gritty details interesting. On the exquisitely titled new podcast Yelling About Pâté, Joel Miller and Karl Hess bring a guest on each week to explore the ins and outs of both those disciplines, with expectedly bawdy brio.
Both are marked by strange office hours, stereotypical “misfit toy” identifiers, to say nothing of the wannabees suffering for years in thankless trenches in order to inch their way upward in their respectively rigid systems of ranks. Yelling About Pâté: The worlds of standup comedy and culinary greatness overlap in more ways than you might expect.