What Cringecore and Podcasts Have In Common

Some thoughts about the blurry line between reality and fiction, comedy and absurdity, podcasts and television...and where they all land in the cultural landscape

Critics At Large is a new weekly podcast from The New Yorker that takes moments from our cultural landscape and helps us to make sense of them. This new show tears a page from the NYTimes playbook, where it allows their staff writers to bust out their audio chops. The show is a three-host format, a delightfully executed high-brow chatcast, with Vinson Cunningham, Alexandra Schwartz, and Noami Fry.

The series launched at the end of September, perhaps an exciting harbinger of what more is to come from The New Yorker (I have not forgotten that they also scooped up In The Dark, have you?)

I don’t have much time in my queue for chatcasts. But if you take three super smart cultural critics, turn them loose on the entire sandbox of culture, which they then delightfully all explain back to me, whilst making sure to remind me of all the relevant cultural tie-ins between television, Capitol I Internet, movies, theatre, books, TikTik, our yen for celebrity gossip, and then helps to explain what being a Swifty really means to my teenage daughters (likened to Beatlemania), I find the time.

CAL launched with two episodes: One that defines and then explores the concept of “Cringecore,” and the other about Elon Musk, which mercifully serves the function of telling me everything I need to know about the recent biography, penned by the eponymous biographical writer Walter Isaacson so that I don’t have to read it.

Today I want to zero in on the concept, the world, of “Cringecore,” and then explore how this relates to podcasts

Alexandra Schwartz leads this episode and offers a definition, or perhaps a description, of what Cringecore is:

The narrator, or the star/host, is there to guide the viewer through an experience, or a story, where the job of the listener is to “feel basically humiliated on behalf of the other person.“ 

In the television world, especially in the comedy genre, cringe is a design standard. In the reality television format, we are supposed to feel embarrassed on behalf of the other people who are not there (or to offer solid advice that can’t be heard by the sometimes unwitting participants).

This is part of the technique that I’ll call breaking down the Fourth Wall, between you and the events unfolding on screen. Reality television does this in Love Is Blind when participants are pulled aside to do a face-to-face with the camera…and in scripted comedy, like in Modern Family or The Office, when the cast is pulled aside and sit facing the camera, where they speak directly to the camera / you. That’s the Fourth Wall.

Podcasts often employ this technique; it’s uniquely suited to the way podcasts are consumed, mostly alone, usually with headphones (ie a very intimate setting). Sometimes it’s about when the narration is spoken in an intimate and connecting way, Erica Heilman is masterful at this, or it draws you into the storyline, Bianca Giaver does this beautifully in Constellation Prize: Nightwalking.

Going back to Critics At Large for a moment, as I listened to this episode, I couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of concern

The clips that they played on this episode were largely taken from Nathan For You, an HBO comedy series that ran for four years and concluded in 2018.

As I listened to these clips play, I realized they were television clips. But here’s the thing: they also sounded like badly produced podcasts. Each scene was underscored with an overly dramatic dollop of emotion-inducing music.

Schwartz defines that “feeling of terrified revulsion…Oh, God here we are again…“ as the heart of Cringecore.

I quickly recognized this the line that so many podcast producers walk; they are constantly using this technique, while also continually trying to gauge if they have pushed that limit one step too far.

The Cringecore CAL episode plays a clip from a Nathan For You skit with a travel agent, who packaged tours for the elderly but realized that he should also upsell funeral services to them because they are old. And then another Nathan episode about a guy who had lied about having an advanced degree, so he created an elaborate ruse that involved recreating a bar in the exact image of a library, and then hired people who had gone to that school and worked as bartenders, just to keep the scam alive.

These are absurd stories, but not entirely un-believable. In the world of podcasts, literally anything seems possible now, as we mine down to new depths of personal stories. When the element of “surprise” wags every episode, we have to keep finding new ways to achieve this.

In the television clips that were replayed on the podcast, there was field tape, which was the backstory to the experience, mixed with the live action, the scene, which happened around that character, and a couple of witty vox pops. Every now and then you’ll get an interjection from the host, who in this case is Nathan, who offers a deeper explanation of something we were supposed to think or feel.

Wait. Isn’t that basically the format of every podcast?

As I listened, I definitely felt cringe. But what jumped out at me above that was how much of the podcast lexicon has bled into other forms of storytelling…or has it gone the other way?

But where’s the line between the joke and the reality?

I do think that podcasts are doing a good job of contributing to the cultural landscape of our global society. They are solidly middle-class in this regard. Narrative podcasts break down barriers, solve cold cases, tell hidden stories, and bring voices out into the world that need to be heard, quite often with an alternative take on whatever the subject matter is. They are novel, and “surprising,” as every successful focus statement will tell you.

What can we say about the uncomfortable closeness of the podcast format with the, now-defined, Cringecore format?

When a new term is defined, often by writers, journalists, or cultural critics, we know they’ve hit something when it becomes a cringe-worthy skit (like when “mansplaining” was done by Saturday Night Live). Maybe that’s the mark that a new term has finally made its entrance through the side door into mainstream culture. Critics love this, it’s the golden goose.

As I was listening to this episode, I remembered that I’ve seen podcasts in this cringe territory before. Remember Portlandia? It’s a genius sketch comedy show that ended in 2015, created by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. 

The scene opens in a briefing room at a police station. The Captain is sharing the evidence from the latest case. And then the camera pans to the back of the room, where Armisen and Brownstein are “embedded” in the room, wearing headphones and holding microphones. After they listened to the introduction of the case made by the Captain, the “podcasters” began to narrate the experience. “The air is humid, in Portland, Oregan….” he began, before the single note on the piano played. By the time he got to the name stamp portion ”And this is…Forgotten America, Rural Footprints…” the duet of banjo and viola slowly stepped into view.

One Officer turns to the Captain and asks: “Can’t we get rid of these guys, there’s no Press allowed.” To which the Captain says, “No. They’re good. We had the option between body cameras and podcasters, and we went with podcasters—my kids love them.”

It’s all absurd…but it’s also…real. Police actually do need the true crime genre of podcasts to help solve crimes, last I checked. Not to mention..swap out the facts and the details and this could be any number of podcasts out there.

So where does that leave us?

If you live with teenagers, you’ve likely heard something like the one I got the other day: “Ew, Mom, not those pants. Cringe.”

If cringe is what makes you wince, then Cringecore is about expanding that moment 100 times and then diving into it. Followed by embracing it and then finally by owning it. We know this because when Taylor Swift accepted her Honourary Degree from New York University last year, as she addressed the audience, she offered some sage advice: “Learn to live alongside cringe.”

Schwartz describes reality in our culture: “It’s like The Last Undiscovered Tribe of the Amazon…we’ll never make contact with it again. It’s all reality and it’s been explored and exploited, and it’s hard to get the pure thing anymore.”

She asks, from a cultural perspective, does reality, and here the discussion about Cringecore, bring us closer to reality or take us farther away from it? 

And I’d like to chime in here, if I may, to ask the follow-up question to these three hosts, which is how does this uncomfortable connection between reality and cringe weigh in on the podcast format?

The satisfying answer actually comes in the most recent episode, which now is about John le Carré, when asked how we read le Carré today, knowing all that we know, Schwartz answers: “As we often like to say about writers, great writers teach how us to read them.“

This leaves me in an obvious place, where I can follow up to say: great podcasters teach us how to listen to them.

And I would only like to add: just be careful about how much music you bed down under that narration track, as we listen. Let’s keep it real.

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What’s coming up soon for Bingeworthy?

Remember this series from the summer: Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story? Coming up, a story about how this team approached this story with some different journalism ethics.

AND, psst, did you know that CANADALAND turned 10? In podcast network terms, that makes them solidly middle-aged. Soon I’ll bring you a conversation about what all of that means, and where the next decade will take them.