As the lights dimmed at Brooklyn Opera House, the audience braced themselves for a video interlude. Soon, the venue’s movie screen filled with the familiar visage of Ben Hosley, producer of the comedic film-appreciation podcast, Blank Check, whose live show had packed the house on this particular March evening. The video’s premise was clear right away: Hosley playing the Nicole Kidman part in an inside joke-riddled parody of that ubiquitous AMC ad from a couple years back. The crowd promptly responded by hooting and hollering.
It isn’t exactly common for a podcast’s fanbase to shower the show’s producer in rapturous applause. But it isn’t exactly uncommon anymore either.
At a recent show in Minneapolis for Doughboys, a podcast about chain restaurants, the crowd cheered at a mere mention of producer Emma Erdbrink, who regularly guests on Patreon episodes, only to groan in sympathy when the hosts revealed she was sick with food poisoning. The crowds at live shows for leftist comedy podcast Chapo Trap House never have to wait long for producer Chris Wade to be mentioned, since he now joins the hosts on stage for their tour dates. Producer Marissa Melnyk’s face is splashed across the artwork for one of the shows she worked on until recently, the pop culture drafting podcast All Fantasy Everything, while producer Jamie Vernon from The Joe Rogan Experience has his very own merch.
Although some producers welcome an occasional spotlight and others practically have to be dragged into your AirPods kicking and screaming, what’s clear is that the rich radio tradition of an on-mic producer—the Robin Quivers to Howard Stern, the Roz Doyle to Frasier Crane—has hit the flourishing podcast circuit, and hit it hard.
The plumber behind the boards
Well-produced talk-show podcasts don’t necessarily sound well–produced. They might not even sound produced at all, if you’re unfamiliar with sound design. Although the kind of narrative show that exists as a dry run for an eventual Hulu series might be flush with bells and whistles, the average talk show podcast is meant to exude a naturalism that goes down smooth—the sound of a few articulate friends hanging out, which somebody happened to record.
That sound, though, is an illusion the show’s producer manufactures. In reality, podcasts are weekly audio puzzles made of moving parts that tend to smash into each other and require reassembly.
“Producers are like plumbers: Most of the time no one should notice if we’re doing our jobs right, but if the job doesn’t get done, there’s shit everywhere,” says Brendan James, former producer of Chapo Trap House and current cohost of Blowback, a narrative podcast about American imperialism.
What makes a talk show pod worth listening to is obviously the hosts—their perspectives, depth of knowledge, or the chemistry between them—but it’s the producer who makes each episode listenable, in any number of ways the average fan might never have thought about.
If you’ve ever appreciated anything a producer has said on air, consider everything else they had to do before, during, and after the recording.
Producers are in charge of all the boring stuff in the background that has to happen before the hosts even arrive. They are tedium-sponges, absorbing their body weight in logistical difficulties. In addition to setting up equipment and other technical tasks, they plot out recording schedules, which become more complicated the more hosts a show has, and the more each has going on; they book guests, a process that sometimes involves publicists promising to “circle back” and then not doing that; and they have to connect with merch vendors and brand reps while also possibly handling tour details. If the producer is worth their salt, the hosts should be unburdened by so many stressors that they feel as though they haven’t got a care in the world.
“All I want them to have to do is sit down to the microphone to talk and then get up and leave without worrying about everything that makes that possible,” says Doughboys‘ Erdbrink.
When the recording is finished, the producer goes into surgeon mode. They excise dead air, flubbed lines, dud jokes, and in the case of Doughboys, chewing noises; they implant ad breaks and rearrange segments; and they give the whole ordeal a comprehensive cosmetic overhaul.
“I try to give everyone the most generous edit possible,” says Chapo‘s Wade. “I cut out anything that doesn’t work and emphasize everything that does by doing things like tightening pauses.”
“It takes a little more effort, but you can make someone sound so much smarter and so much funnier if you make the punchline of whatever they’re saying as clean as you can,” says Melnyk, the former AFE producer.Then there’s everything an on-mic producer might have to do on mic.
Security blankets, sounding boards, and surrogates
Most of the work that goes into actually recording a podcast can be done by an audio engineer with a steady set of hands. The producer technically doesn’t even have to show up for this part, and if they work on a lot of shows, they probably don’t. If it’s a show the producer is more personally involved in, however, the recording process opens up an entire new dimension of duties.
On the low end, there’s on-the-fly research. A producer can confirm or deny facts under on-air debate, add bullet points to any topic the hosts bring up but quickly run out of steam with, or just uncover the title of that third Strokes album the guest can’t quite remember.
“If there’s something they might need to stop and look up, I don’t want them to even think they might have to ask me to do that,” says Bobby Wagner, a producer for The Ringer network who works on shows such as The Big Picture. “I want to be a security blanket.”
Other times, the on-mic producer works as a sounding board of some kind. Wagner and his fellow Ringer producer Craig Horlbeck are occasionally called upon as resident young people when hosts like Bill Simmons or Sean Fennessey want to know whether twenty-somethings still see every Marvel movie or have ever heard of Emmitt Smith. Similarly, when Melnyk was the producer for All Fantasy Everything, the three middle-aged male comedian hosts would often ask her for a female counterpoint to whatever they’d just said about the topic at hand. She, in turn, would occasionally push for clarification when one of their cultural references sailed over her Millennial head and seemed like it might throw some listeners, too.
This is part of a larger aspect of what producers do during a recording: keep their ears tuned into what isn’t being said—or what’s maybe being said too much.
“I’m always trying to think about the listener’s experience,” says Blank Check‘s Hosley. “I try to speak up and add something I think the audience might similarly be thinking in that moment, or be the voice of reason, like ‘Okay, enough,’ when something isn’t working, either creatively or timewise.”
As the person on the show most closely aligned with how the listener takes it in, producers serve as audience surrogates. They can nudge the conversation toward wherever listeners might want it to go, if the hosts seem too caught up in the moment to realize it. Talk-show podcasts thrive on spontaneity as much as planning, so while the hosts are encouraged to get caught up in one moment after another, the producer never loses sight of the bigger picture.
Sometimes when the hosts get a little too caught up in the moment, though, they can end up at each other’s throats, creating another role for the producer: referee. Successful podcasters tend to be verbally dexterous, charismatic and opinionated, so producing a show with more than one of them almost inevitably involves managing personalities and massaging egos, something that can happen both off and on mic.
The hosts of Doughboys, for instance, have a playfully adversarial relationship on the show, whether they’re leaning into it to stay in character or legitimately getting on each other’s nerves. “I’ve definitely played mediator from time to time,” says Erdbrink, “but [hosts Mike Mitchell and Nick Wiger] are grown adult men who can talk through their feelings when they need to.”
Dealing with feuding hosts on mic is the kind of tightrope task new producers can’t really prepare themselves for. But by the time most hosts would feel comfortable enough with their producer to involve them in on-air squabbles, they will have already been through a lot together.
Developing the show, developing with the show
The amount a podcast’s producer appears on-mic often depends upon the producer’s comfort level and their history with the show.
“Some producers are improv comedians who have funny stuff to say, and I am . . . not that,” says Melnyk, who enjoyed chopping it up with the All Fantasy Everything hosts, but also suffers from performance anxiety and prefers to keep a low profile.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Hosley, who was already writing and performing comedy when he started producing podcasts, and whose level of engagement on Blank Check—especially the show’s Patreon episodes—sometimes verges into third-host territory.
Most producers seem to fall somewhere between these two extremes.
If you scratch a book editor, you’ll often find an aspiring author underneath, but the same isn’t necessarily true about producers and podcasters—even the ones who have their own podcasts. Wade started And Introducing, the rock biography pod he hosts with his wife, Molly O’Brien, mainly to better understand the industry he was transitioning into from video production. Although Wade is always up for jumping in on Chapo episodes when one of the hosts or a guest drops out, like the sixth man on an NBA team, he has never lobbied for more airtime.
Similarly, Wagner started his baseball podcast Tipping Pitches as he was graduating from NYU, just to see if he could actually create a show, soup to nuts, with no built-in production help. Maintaining a podcast of his own gave Wagner a crash course in not only the audio tech side but idea-generation and finding a show’s voice, which eventually carried over to his work at The Ringer. When the network launched the Baseball Bar-B-Cast last fall, Wagner was quick to help hosts Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman formulate new segments on air in real time.
Getting in on the ground floor may be a good way for a producer to become part of a podcast’s firmament, but so is helping to construct the ground floor.
When she was a producer at the Headgum network, Melnyk helped comedian Nicole Byer develop her hit podcast Why Won’t You Date Me? from a cold pitch—and though she’s seldom if ever heard from on the show, she has won awards for her role and Byer frequently refers to her on air as “Super producer Marissa.”
About a decade ago, Hosley convinced the leadership at UCB to start a podcast network. Among its initial offerings was The Phantom Podcast, a high-concept curio in which comedian and actor Griffin Newman and film critic David Sims discussed the first Star Wars prequel as though it were a standalone film in a context-free vacuum. Although Hosley didn’t intend to vocally contribute to the show, Newman quickly realized the comedic potential of looping in his Star Wars-agnostic producer as a normal-guy counterpoint to his and Sims’ nerdery. By the time the show rebranded as Blank Check, and switched to dissecting the filmographies of major directors, the hosts’ interplay with Hosley was already baked in as a feature of the show. It has only evolved ever since, as the show hopped from network to network before going independent.
Of course, producers need not help develop a podcast to become a fixture of it; sometimes, they just need to develop rapport with the hosts. Wade’s rambling post-game conversations with Chapo’s Matt Christman, for instance, led to the pair jointly creating and hosting the limited run podcasts Hell on Earth and Hell of Presidents. And as a loud and proud Mets fan, Wagner ended up sparring off-mic with the hosts of the now-defunct Ringer MLB Show, to the point where they began regularly taking digs at him or asking his opinions on-air.
“When you have a good off-mic relationship with the hosts, you might as well bring some of those conversations to the show,” he says.
Just because a producer knows they might be called upon to weigh in from time to time, though, doesn’t mean they should just chime in whenever.
Every time you speak up, it’s a K.O.
One of the reasons fans grow attached to the producers of hit podcasts is because most of them are conscious of wanting to be strictly additive forces on-mic. They pick their spots wisely, weighing in only to fill momentary pauses or when they have some killer material on deck.
“You don’t want to pop off just because you have something to say at all,” says James. “It makes you look better if every time you speak up, it’s a K.O. Then it sounds like you always have a great joke in the chamber.”
It helps, of course, that if an interjection turns out to not be so great, the producer can always take a digital eraser to it afterward.
“I can’t lie and claim that I haven’t edited out a few times when I said something and later was like, ‘Why did I bother?’” Wade admits.
Knowing when to chime in takes some social calculus. While the number-one rule is to never talk over or surprise the host, a producer needs to make sure they aren’t throwing off momentum, bigfooting the guest, or making a point or punchline that the hosts might get to without them.
“If I have a funny joke to make but if it’s gonna step on the bit they’re doing, I’m always gonna ditch my joke and let their bit reign supreme,” Erdbrink says.
If a producer’s calculus is off, they are at risk of incurring the wrath of not only the hosts themselves, but their fans—and a popular podcast’s fans can be downright Swiftian in their lack of chill when it comes to grievances.
“If someone is trying too hard and just doesn’t have the juice, I can imagine listeners complaining,” James says.
But for producers who figure out just the right amount to interject, there are obvious benefits. Their profile rises not just with fans of the show, but within the greater entertainment landscape, where they can experience something like job security. When Erdbrink started working on the podcast Good Christian Fun, for instance, hosts Kevin T. Porter and Caroline Ely were excited to have “Emma from Doughboys” as their producer.
Another great benefit of connecting with listeners as an on-mic producer, though, is the satisfaction of feeling like they’re a part of what makes a hit show a hit—because they are.
“Being a podcast producer is more like being a bassist than being a record producer,” says Wade. “You’re there to help keep the groove, tone, rhythm, and foundation going—and you’re not trying to be the center of attention, but it is nice when you get a little solo.”
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