Week-to-Week: Celebrity Podcasts, Fake Award Shows, and the Production of Culture

In her past two album cycles, Taylor Swift signaled the beginning of a new era at award shows. Midnights was announced at the 2022 VMA Awards, following her win for Video of the Year for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” while The Tortured Poets Department was revealed in her speech accepting the Grammy Award for Pop Vocal Album in 2024.

Despite a traumatic experience early in her career, evidence suggests Taylor Swift loves award shows. As she transitioned to her pop era, she consciously straddled the weird fall Grammy deadline so that the first single could compete in one year and the album the next, ensuring nominations every year from 2012-2016, and three consecutive performances from 2012-2014. Her album announcements extended her use of award shows as a platform for promotion, yes, but also identity formation. It’s not a coincidence that the ur-text of the Taylor’s Version era is her American Music Awards Artist of the Decade performance, preceded as it was by a public battle with Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta. When Taylor Swift steps onto a televised stage, she does so acknowledging the cultural weight of the award show as a form.

So it is meaningful that Swift chose a new form to announce “TS12,” The Life of a Showgirl: a podcast. And yes, I know it is not just a podcast, but rather the podcast co-hosted by her boyfriend, but I’m not interested in that for the time being. If she had wanted to stick with award shows, she had an option—the VMAs, where she’s nominated for Artist of the Year, are on September 7. By choosing a podcast, it’s an acknowledgment that they have become—by way of a turn toward celebrity and “celebritized” content—a cultural space worth investing in, and one that recently overlapped with award shows in a productive way for thinking about the impact of both spaces: the Las Culturista Culture Awards, a spinoff of Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s Las Culuristas podcast, which aired on Bravo and Peacock last week.

Technically, despite her insistence this was her first podcast, Taylor Swift has been on one before, interviewed by Apple’s Zane Lowe as part of Apple Music naming her songwriter of the year in 2020. However, Lowe’s podcast is an extension of the existing ecosystem of radio interviews musicians are expected to engage with as part of press tours. Technically speaking, any time a celebrity gives an interview—a talk show, a podcast, a YouTube video—it is part of a press tour, but promotional content has increasingly attempted to shift toward perceptions of authenticity. We saw this with YouTube videos from publications like Vanity Fair or Buzzfeed that pivoted to setups—lie detectors, puppy interviews—designed to reveal the “real” person outside of their public image. We also see it with influencer talk shows like Brittany Broski’s Royal Court or Jake Shane’s Therapuss, where stars like David Corenswet or Selena Gomez become more relatable by their willingness to appear alongside influencers whose brands are built on relatability.

Technically, Influencer Podcasts are also Celebrity Podcasts in our present moment—by way of their large online followings, it would be hard to consider someone like Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper anything but a celebrity, even if she didn’t start as one. But there is also a particular genre of star-on-star content, whereby famous people ape the authenticity of online creators by putting themselves in front of a microphone in either a set-decorated corner of their home or a generic-looking studio set to chat with other famous people. It was a trend that first emerged in the genre of “comedy podcasts,” from the ramshackle origins of WTF in Marc Maron’s garage—who has continued to resist the pivot to video as his show comes to a close, bless him—to Dax Shephard’s Armchair Expert, which Spotify signed exclusively in a 2021 deal estimated to be worth $50 million (and has since signed an $80 million deal with Amazon). And while there are plenty more where that came from—like Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Bateman/Hayes/Arnett’s Smartless, and Amy Poehler’s Good Hang—the trend has logically extended into spaces like sports, which brings us back to Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights.

What’s funny about New Heights is that despite Taylor Swift never guesting on the show to this point, she has long been a significant part of its cultural caché. New Heights existed before her relationship with Travis Kelce, featuring a combination of shop talk between the active NFL players/brothers  and guest appearances by other athletes/sports personalities like Rob Gronkowski. But the first time a clip came across my non-sports feed was Kelce’s July 2023 comments about his trip to the Eras Tour and his failed attempt to gift her a friendship bracelet. That clip—which Kelce thanks a member of their staff for clipping in this week's episode—became an origin story for their relationship, and subsequently the podcast clips began leveraging the crossover attention the relationship created. The guest list diversified as well: while there is ostensibly a sports connection with Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis, he is one of a number of actors and musicians that have appeared on the show in the past two years (Brad Pitt was the most recent for his sports-adjacent presence in F1).

And so, on the one hand, you could frame Taylor Swift’s appearance on New Heights as her boosting her boyfriend’s podcast, as I saw across TikTok leading up to its release. But it’s also her entrance into a broader celebritized podcast space—given that Jake Shane has recently featured Swift pals Gomez and Haim, his TikTok followers were in his comments perceiving Swift’s willingness to do a podcast as a sign she might do his. The same speculation was referenced in this week’s episode of Las Culturistas, where Yang and Rogers spend the beginning of their show addressing the breaking news and expressing their desire to be next. Does this signal Swift’s willingness to embrace the perceived collapse of public and private within the confines of 60-120 minutes in front of a microphone with someone famous or internet famous in multiple contexts moving forward?

My gut says no, but mostly because Taylor Swift gets everything she needs out of this episode of New Heights. There are new details from her courtship with Kelce, behind-the-scenes stories about the Eras Tour, personal insight into her purchase of her master recordings, the news of her father’s open heart surgery, and of course the reveal of her new album. My takeaway from the podcast is how much of an expert Taylor Swift is at harnessing cultural forms to her purposes. She talks at one point how she wants to “work within the framework of the podcast,” specifically in presenting The Life of a Showgirl as part of the show’s recurring “New News” segment. She is too much of a planner—a “Mastermind,” one could say—to approach this as a free-form, open-ended discussion (not that any of these celebrity podcasts really are): this is a targeted disclosure, carefully considered as a form of self-expression. Much as she understands award shows, she understands podcasts, insofar as they can be used to further her goals.

What unites the two spaces is the focus on creating culture. Note that I don’t mean “content” here, although obviously in our contemporary moment both award shows and podcasts are clipped into bite-sized videos for social platforms. What I mean is the notion that someone of Swift’s stature being present in these spaces has a weight to it. Swift’s performativity has long been a subject in terms of her award show appearances, both in terms of formal environments like actual songs or acceptance speeches, and through her active participation as an audience member.

From her shocked reactions after early wins to the directors’ obsession with her singing and dancing, Swift understands the type of attention award shows create, and presents a version of herself that serves that space. With her album announcements, she leverages the rare moment of direct address—even in cases where the award wasn’t voted on by fans, her acceptance speeches are an opportunity to speak to them en masse. She knows the world is watching, and what they’re watching for, and she delivers that.

I argue here that the world of celebrity and celebrity-adjacent podcasts represents a similar type of platform for cultural production, although the other one I want to discuss didn’t start out as part of this world. Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers were not celebrities when Las Culturistas started in 2016. Yang wouldn’t join the cast of Saturday Night Live until 2019, and so the podcast developed within a framework of queer comedians commenting on popular culture independent of their own fame. However, as Yang collected Emmy nominations and eventually went on to co-star in Wicked, the show became a celebrity podcast whether he and Rogers wanted it to or not. Tina Fey’s appearance on the show went viral last year for her version of the show’s “I Don’t Think So, Honey” segment, in which she argued Yang had become too famous to give his actual opinion of films on the podcast lest it complicate his professional life.

As she puts it, “authenticity is dangerous and expensive,” but it’s also what the entire celebrity podcast industry is built on, and what their podcast built its audience cultivating outside of the celebrity context. But as Swift’s appearance on New Heights displays, celebrity podcasts aren’t about authenticity: they are about using the perception of relative authenticity to create cultural moments that resonate distinctly from traditional promotion. It’s a skill that Yang and Rogers have honed as they’ve focused more on celebrity interviews, which are the only episodes released on YouTube (with their weekly gab sessions covering culture at large reserved for the podcast feed). It’s also a skill that Rogers has translated into his audition for the fourth hour of The Today Show, where he recently wrapped up his second guest stint as Jenna Bush Hager’s co-host. And it’s also a skill that was on full display during the Las Culturistas Culture Awards’ first ever televised edition, which debuted on Bravo on August 5.

The Culture Awards are a joke. Although some of the awards are modeled off of real industry awards—Album of the Year and Record of the Year, for example—others are just bits, from their very conception. Award shows are by their nature about the tension between an industry-oriented contest and an audience-facing spectacle, but Yang and Rogers have cracked the code by engineering the former entirely in service of the latter. The Culture Awards embrace the form of the award show as a producer of culture, designing awards and winners to create the moments they want to see in the world. Some of these involve themselves, like their In Abstentia performance of “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” memorializing the celebrities who passed on being a part of the awards. In other cases, they curate culture, whether in awarding an in-character Andy Samberg “Straight Man of the Year” or Ben Platt’s orchestral cover of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” (which I’m sharing in its single version because it restores the second verse that was inexplicably cut from the broadcast).

I’ll spare you my entire newsletter on the latter, which has taken over my TikTok FYP and been on repeat ever since, but you might at this point be concerned I’m over my skis trying to mash up these two topics. Joke’s on you, though, because Taylor Swift was part of the first-ever Las Culturistas awards in 2022, held as a live event at Lincoln Center in New York. Although not broadcast, the show included both the Taylor Swift Award and the Tayla Swiff awards, accepted via video by Swift with a clear understanding of the assignment in front of her.

Additionally, Yang and Rogers reveal on this week’s episode of the podcast that they did reach out to Swift about appearing at this year’s awards, but that it was “not a good time,” which they interpret as a sign she was saving her public reappearance for New Heights. However, it’s also a detail that Yang shares with the caveat that it “might be cut out,” because they don’t want to be perceived as throwing shade or criticizing someone that would give them access to the kind of cultural moment their genre of podcast is striving to achieve.

And indeed, trying to transition their authentic comic perspective to a celebritized form requires such compromises. But much like celebrity podcasts leverage their relative authenticity, the Culture Awards—despite the presence of sponsors and the Andy Cohen-infused intro that reinforce they are serving corporate priorities—feel uncompromised. If you don’t know who Paige DeSorbo or Gabby Windey are, you’re simply not part of the culture, and that’s fine. Despite moving to a televised context, the Culture Awards have retained the ethos of a live taping of a podcast, reclaiming the award show as a single-minded engine for the kind of cultural moments industry-oriented awards try to create but often struggle to achieve. The fake award show and celebrity podcasts are each deeply embedded in the industrial systems they purport to bypass, but they share a spirit of authenticity that has clear cultural power in our contemporary moment.

To some degree, the success of my attempt to merge these two subjects depends on whether Swift stops by Las Culturistas as part of the album promo for the October release of The Life of a Showgirl. But even if she doesn’t, the very notion she could is going to be a meaningful topic among fans of Swift and the various celebrity and influencer podcasters, reinforcing the space this genre of podcasts takes up in our current cultural conversation (and, well, this newsletter).

Episodic Observations

• As long-time subscribers know, I am regularly on the Taylor Swift beat as an actual Taylor Swift scholar, and so I do have feelings about the other details about the new record, especially the reunion with Max Martin and Shellback. The short version before we hear the record is that what defined their partnership was their collective desire to merge her songwriting instincts with the music of a particular moment (hence the EDM on Red or the rapping on Reputation). What does that look like in 2025? I’m intrigued to find out.
• While Tony Winner Ben Platt performing the song is part of the joke, I do appreciate how clear it is that the arrangement of “Diet Pepsi” is a product of Matt Rogers, having added his Christmas albums to my yearly rotation. Still seeking out confirmation that “I like it from the fountain” was there before Platt became involved, but I’m betting on it.
• As noted, I really don’t care about Taylor Swift’s personal relationships, but I was admittedly charmed by the moment when she makes a “Loafing You Was Bread” pun during the sourdough discussion, and he clearly doesn’t get it, and she notes that he doesn’t know that song because it wasn’t on the tour. Was this moment already clipped into a TikTok on my FYP by this afternoon? Yes.
• For the record, I do know who Gabby Windey is (because Traitors), but while I vaguely presumed that Paige DeSorbo was from Summer House, that was just a presumption based on my having never heard the name before in my life. Just had to smile and nod.
• Yes, this is still a television newsletter, but sometimes culture intervenes. Provided the beginning of the semester doesn’t entirely derail me next week, hoping to get back into a weekly groove reflecting on what I’m watching. In the meantime, if you have something specific you want to discuss, all paid subscribers can post on the Episodic Discussion, and Loyal Viewers have access to the new Episodic Medium Discord. You can find more information on all of that on our About Page.
• Speaking of which: if this newsletter went to spam or Gmail’s “Promotions” tab, that’s just a reality of the move that we’re going to live with. If you move it to your inbox, it should correct moving forward. And if anyone has any issues related to the move, you can email me at episodicmedium at gmail.