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I'm your every-other-episode host Marc Hershon, ushering you through Epi219 of Succotash Shut-In: The Soundcast Stimulus Package. If you missed episode 218, with our every-OTHER-episode host Tyson Saner, in which he featured snippets from comedy soundcasts The Honeydew Podcast with Ryan Sickler, The Bitchuation Room, and Vegan Abattoir, you can still fill yours ears with at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, the Laughable app, and our homesite: SuccotashShow.com.
I got a lot of nice responses and retweets to our Episode 217, where I interviewed multi-threat talent Mike Birbiglia, and you can still listen to that show as well. But this week I'm back to featuring a quadruple cluster of comedy soundcast clips. You can probably figure out my theme for this installment by the title: "Mockin' Murders (and Other True Crimes)". One of the most popular genres in soundcasting for the past few years – ever since Serial, actually, back in 2014 — is true crime. And following on the heels of it are the fake true crime shows. There have been some great ones. There have been some bad ones. But I thought I'd feature a few of the best ones, past and present, in case you haven't had a chance to catch them.
I'm featuring clips from A Very Fatal Murder, Done Disappeared, My Neighbors Are Dead, and This Sounds Serious. And, as per always, Succotash Shut-In is sponsored by Henderson's Pants, this week featuring their new Picnic Pants, just in time for socially social distancing! And our other regular sponsor is Trumpoetry.com, aiming a rhyming barrage of bombast squarely at the Orange Menace until he's out of office OR until this show finally gets a paying sponsor. Then we toss both of those freeloading ad-peddlers out of Soundcastville.
Let's get to the…
CLIPS
A Very Fatal MurderIf you're a fan of true crime stories, real or imagined, you owe it to yourself to catch A Very Fatal Murder, produced by the Onion starting with Season 1 back in 2018. There have been two seasons, eight episodes apiece, and a third season was supposed to drop this year but I've found no sign of it yet. The intrepid, kudos-hungry citizen journalist is a soundcaster named David Pascall, voiced by David Sidorov, who also wrote the soundcast with head writer Katy Yeiser. The first season involves trying to find the perpetrator of the "perfect murder" of Hayley Price, a beloved high school student in the small town of Bluff Springs, Nebraska. This clip is from the premiere episode of the first season, where Pascall arrives in town and begins to sketch out a typical American town where murder can happen.
Done DisappearedIn the spirit of Wondery's The Vanished came Done Disappeared, a three season (so far) that started in 2017. Investigative soundcaster John David Booter (which may or may not be a fictional nom de cast) goes in search of the truth behind the disappearance of Clara Pockets, a Pennsylvania woman. The very first episode has Booter arriving at the scene of a crime which may not be the scene of THE crime, but it's a mess either way. I left in Booter's live reading of a Me Undies commercial because it's pretty damned funny, I don't think it's legit, and I'm jealous that Succotash, which has been soundcasting since 2011, has never had Me Undies as a sponsor.
My Neighbors Are DeadOkay, this next show we're featuring is a little different from the true crime spoof. My Neighbors Are Dead, which we originally clipped back in 2017, is more "meta" than that. It works on the premise that horrific murders from movies — like Nightmare on Elm Street and the Jason movies — are real, and the host, Adam Peacock, interviews some of the lesser known characters (and often survivors) of those films. It's also improvised, unlike the three other shows we're featuring this episode, which are tightly written and produced pieces. We're clipping the most recent installment, Halloween H2O with guest Lauren Ash, who you may now from Superstore and the Giving It Up for Less soundcast, is onboard to talk about her love of the Halloween franchise. She also portrays a hapless single mom whose van gets stolen by Michael Myers.
This Sounds Serious: Grand CasinoWhich brings us to the final clip we're featuring this week. It's from a show we have featured several times in the past, mainly because I think it's not only hilarious but incredibly well written, performed, and produced. I've also got a podcrush on the producers, Kelly&Kelly, who do a whole lot more than This Sounds Serious, and it's all funny. The third season just dropped for this show and I reviewed the first episode last week for This Week in Comedy Podcasts on Vulture.com. The host of the show is still Gwen Radford (played by Carly Pope), yet another intrepid soundcast journalist but one who is fixated on 9-1-1 calls. This time around, in the season entitled Grand Casino, it's a call from back in 1991 that puts her on the path of tracking down a Hollywood conman. They tap into some solid soundcast casting with Paul F. Tompkins and Gary Anthony Williams, but there also some voices from the Kelly&Kelly stable that really know how to come across as almost the real deal, if the situations weren't quite so cracked.
So that's that. Dunzo. Epi219 is in the can, so to speak. Tyson Saner and I will continue to bring you episodes of Succotash Shut-In every week as long as we can and as long as this extended period of lockdown or shelter-in-place continues. It's all to both celebrate comedy soundcasts and also to give you a chance to sample some shows you might not have heard or been aware of, given there are literally hundreds of thousands of soundcasts out there.
If you want to reach me and/or Tyson, you can address either of us @succotashshow.com or listen to Bill Heywatt's wrapup coming up for things like the hotline number and the URL where you can upload clips from your own comedy soundcast directly to us to include in the show!
Until next time, let's try not to be assholes to each other, wear a mask (if you don't get THAT, there's really no way for us to be friends), and remember to please pass the Succotash!
— Marc Hershon
