These days you can hardly enter and exit a coffee shop without someone in line asking you to subscribe to their podcast. It’s like the new version of getting handed a mixtape on every corner of Los Angeles or New York City. So ABC couldn’t have picked a better time to launch a new TV series based off a podcast about the experience of making podcasts. Meta, right? “Alex Inc.” stars Zach Braff as Alex Schuman, a seasoned radio professional who hops aboard the podcasting train to create his own podcast company and take audiences along for the ride to experience the plight of the entrepreneur.
It’s the first mainstream attempt to adapt a podcast for television, and ABC couldn’t have picked a more interesting story to tell — because it’s not really about podcasting.
“Alex Inc.” is the story of real life entrepreneur and podcaster Alex Blumberg, who launched the podcast “StartUp” to chronicle the beginning of his digital media company, Gimlet Media. In the first season you are there with Alex and his wife for the vulnerable and often painful discussions of finances, like a fly on the wall for the hardest parts of starting a business. “StartUp” brings you along as Alex seeks seed funding in Silicon Valley and pitches aloof investors with his idea, and the feedback is not always glowing. It’s cliche, but you’ll laugh and cry on Alex’s journey to launching Gimlet and learn some valuable lessons about entrepreneurship along the way. Since the first season, “StartUp” now profiles other successful startups as well as some notable disasters.
Podcasting is an ascendant form of media, reaching 60 million homes in the U.S. and a solid 50 percent of the population identifying as fans of a podcast. The annual numbers for podcast listenership are astounding in a media market dogged by decline in all the traditional mediums. Since 2006, the number of people who know what a podcast is has doubled while the number of podcasts on Libsyn, a podcast hosting service, has tripled to more than 30,000. It’s an appropriate form of media for the “on demand” age, where audio, video, and news alike are rigorously segmenting audiences and moving away from the live to air model. It’s radio for the selfie generation, where all you need is an iPhone to record your thoughts and then upload them to the web to find a following (or not).
“Alex Inc.” is sure to build on the momentum of podcasting into the cultural mainstream, but is it any good? Reviews are coming in, and let’s just say they are mixed. The series is being described universally as a “family show,” with a sneer from the technology and podcasting crowd and a shrug from the indifferent. Braff was once among the highest-paid TV actors during the reign of “Scrubs”, and ABC has to be counting on that long dormant fanbase returning for Braff’s first show since 2010.
Initial impressions are that “Alex Inc.” uses podcasting and the pursuit of storytelling as a backdrop for a quirky family comedy indistinguishable in style from “Modern Family” or “Black-ish”. This kind of leveraging of podcasting rubs loyalists of the medium the wrong way, as does Braff’s performance which embodies the same mannerisms of his character in “Scrubs.” The new show on ABC features Braff reprising his narrator duties and guiding the viewer through each episode. As an actor he has always dealt with skepticism for his thick and cheesy performances and oddball voiceovers, but “Scrubs” prevailed. In retrospect, a show like “Scrubs” getting as big as it did was strange, but when you see “Alex Inc.” taking flak for being a phony representation of the experience of podcasting, you have to wonder why such a standard would apply to this family sitcom and not the slapstick approach “Scrubs” had for the hospital drama genre.
You decide! “Alex, Inc.” premieres on ABC tonight at 8:30 p.m. EST.
Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the spokesperson for Young Voices and host of Beltway Banthas, a “Star Wars” & politics podcast in D.C.
