Introducing...The Five Year Club: A Podcast Re-Listening Initiative

New podcasts are dropping all the time, coming at us so fast we sometimes forget to look back at the greats that came before.

We wrote an entire issue in this newsletter a few months about shows we wish would come back. What’s on it? Punch Up the Jam. Mobituaries. In The Scenes Behind Plain Sight. What podcast didn’t we mention that we totally should have?

Dead Eyes! One of the greatest shows of all time, Dead Eyes!

People still bring it up as one of their favorite shows ever. It was good from the very spark when it launched in January 2020. It continued to be just as great throughout its run, eventually ending with a total bang when host Connor Ratliff got Tom Hanks himself as guest (for those unfamiliar with the premise… that was the goal of the show).

But then, the show ended. Where do you go from there?

We’ve been wanting to re-listen to Dead Eyes, and we know others would like that too, which gave us an idea: let’s re-listen to it with our readers… together! …Which gave us another idea:

Let’s start a club so that we can do this all the time, with shows from the past. Thus, the Five Year Club was born. Shows need to be at least five years old to be considered for the club.

• We introduce the show via an article here on PWTA

• We identify one goal that we have for the re-listen (see below for our Dead Eyes goal)

• We invite you to join in on the re-listen!

  • If it’s a shorter show, we’ll go one episode / week. If it’s longer, we’ll either select one season OR we’ll group together a few episodes at a time.

• You’re welcome to listen at your own pace, of course, but we will be sharing our thoughts weekly in our subscriber-only chat.

• Obviously whether you’re a paid subscriber or not, we want you to re-listen with us.

• Once the re-listen is finished, we’ll write an article about the experience and our findings.

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a recap pulled directly from Lauren’s Podcast the Newsletter review she wrote on Jan 30, 2020:

Note from Lauren: this is embarrassing.) (Not from Arielle: no, this is a piece of history!!)

Dead Eyes is a show where host actor/comedian Connor Ratliff embarks on a similar quest to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from an acting job. Tom’s note about Connor said that he had “dead eyes.” This sounds hilarious at first, but think about just how traumatizing that would be—to know that Tom Hanks saw you, hated your fucking EYES, and kicked you out of his project. You were intolerable to one of the most beloved humans on earth. I think this is more traumatizing than it seems. How do you bounce back? How do you regain your confidence? How do you continue to love your work? I guess Connor does this by starting a podcast. On episode one, Conor works through his pain with his friend D’Arcy Carden. And as Connor points out, everyone has a “dead eyes” story—an incident that has caused them to question who they are, that totally knocks them down and challenges them to get back up.

Relistening to the first episode again made us nostalgic for not exactly January 2020 (yikes) but a more experimental times in podcasting. It’s true that shows like this are being made still. (In fact, extremely coincidentally, there is a new show called I’ve Got a Hunch, where comedian Nate Dern sets out to find who dropped a 50lb suitcase on his head a few years ago, and guess who the first guest is…Connor Ratliff. Guess who the second guess is…D’Arcy Carden (who featured prominently in Dead Eyes. Guess who D’Arcy’s brother in law is…Nate Dern. We know, it’s crazy!)

But listen to this first episode and you hear an introduction to Connor—the acting he’s done but also the kind of person he is. In fact, he asks his friend Zach Woods to “describe [his] face in emotional terms,” which is a great idea, and Zach says:

Just to give some context to anyone who’s listening: We’re standing on a street corner at 1:00 AM outside the West 4th Street subway stop. People are walking by and watching me say to Connor again and again, “Your eyes, your eyes, your eyes.” It’s the most romantic moment we’ve ever had by far. Um, yeah, like you could play a murderer. You could definitely, like you could play someone who kills or you could play someone who like, is a victim of a murder.

That’s in this first episode, too: interviews with two of Connor’s friends. (One of them conducted outside the West 4th Street subway stop, cool!) Connor isn’t telling the story to us, we’re hearing him tell it to people who know him really well. (And super duper coincidentally, Phonograph just ran an episode about how cool it is to hear a storyteller tell a story to someone else).

The episode ends by teeing up what’s to come: this is not a destination, it’ an investigation, a journey. The journey to solve the mystery of Connor’s dead eyes. Is the “dead eyes” story is even true? What really happened behind the scenes? Will Connor get the chance to confront Tom Hanks, or even re-audition for him? In the final few moments, we start to hear about Ordinary People, and why? It’s a link to episode two, an interview with Jon Hamm, who once was cast in a production of Ordinary People with Connor. That’s where this show is going next.

And where are we going next? We’ll be reflecting on this show in the subscriber chat for The Five Year Club.

• We’ll do 3-4 episodes per week, starting August 10th

• We’ll post discussion threads in the Chat

• We’ll include mini-reviews / our thoughts in PWTA articles, so even if you don’t want to join the Chat, you can still follow-along

• Towards the end of the re-listen, we’ll announce our next Five Year Club pick!

WE CAN’T WAIT TO RE-LISTEN. And we can’t wait to hopefully hit our goal.

See ya soon, PWTA-ers! Thanks for reading 💜💛