Best Podcast Reviews

“Everything Is Alive” Defies Genre and Expectations

July 25, 2018 7:35 am

A soda can is a specifically familiar thing. The feel and weight of holding a can of soda is something most people can immediately drum up from memory, and the sound of opening a soda can is so distinct it’s been the primary focus of many a Coke ad.

And yet, ever since I listened to the first episode of Radiotopia’s new production, Everything Is Alive, I can’t help but shake the fact that I’ve been seeing them all wrong.

This podcast, which was created by NPR veteran Ian Chillag, is not quite an audio drama, not quite nonfiction. Everything Is Alive is an unscripted interview series where the subjects are inanimate objects. When I originally heard the concept, I thought it was fun, interesting, probably a bit silly–and it is, but it’s also much more. It is a podcast with a ludicrous setup while still feeling so genuine and being so consistently moving.

The first episode “Louis, Can of Cola” features an interview with a generic brand of cola–a cola that is the “best of the worst,” literally bottom shelf. As the episode opens, Chillag asks Louis about the course of his life, following him from the supermarket to a birthday party to a road trip, though Louis still has yet the be drank. Immediately, there’s a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude that accompanies the interview. It’s aware that it plays off some public radio interview tropes but always feels to earnest and loving to really be satire. Louis Kornfeld’s performance as the can of cola is nonchalant and uncomplicated but still deftly clever and funny in the strange, absurd ways one would expect from having to play a literal can of cola. It’s not quite as broad as H. Jon Benjamin as Wet Hot American Summer‘s can of vegetables, but it’s also, by necessity, stranger than most other comedic roles. The laughs come easily as Louis explains that watching his brethren be chosen for consumption was half jealousy-inducing, half akin to an intense scene in Jaws.

Almost immediately, though, the scene changes. Chillag asks Louis what he thinks being consumed would feel like. An understated but forlorn guitar starts playing in the background. Louis responds:

I’d like to think that if you’re drank immediately, that instead of being a painful process, there’s the sort of first moment of relief: the can is cracked open, all of this internal fizzing that I have going on finally has somewhere to go.

And then just as quickly, it goes back to how Louis has seen Jaws. This back-and-forth between tones isn’t jarring; instead, it feels authentic. As the episode continues, it’s hard not to get attached to Louis, to both his casual vibe and his seemingly unintentional ruminations on life, death, and the vessel that contains us. I listened for the first time during my commute to work, and when a very important moment of foley happened, we happened to pass by a Coke truck, and I had to stop myself from yelling, “Read the room!” at the Coke truck. By the end of its episode, I felt myself tearing up–and then immediately downloading the episode again for a second listen. And then a third.

When I listened to the second episode (which I received for review purposes), I was wary about whether it could stand up to the bond I’d made with Louis, and of course found myself mistaken. The second episode features Maeve, a lamppost in Brooklyn. While Maeve’s episode doesn’t focus on both the metaphysical and deeply physical of Louis’s episode, it does look into what is observed and how.

What makes Everything Is Alive feel special is that it isn’t interviews with larger-than-life inanimate objects; there’s no conversations with moon rocks or Hadron colliders or even iPhones. Instead, the episodes focus on specifically ordinary objects that we don’t think about from day to day, and so far, Maeve the lamppost exemplifies this. The episode starts with Maeve noting that she’s not sure how she was chosen for interview out of all of the lampposts in Brooklyn, and this theme continues throughout the episode, shifting in ways that make her more and more empathetic.

Radiotopia has a lineup of shows that are all, ostensibly, about very specifically not people. Radiotopia usually isn’t concerned with human interest stories in the fashion of This American Life or Serial. Its flagship podcast, 99% Invisible, is about design; Song Exploder is about each layer of a song; The Allusionist is about the histories of language. At their core, though, all of these shows really are about humans: 99% Invisible is about how design intersects with, is influenced by, and directly affects culture; Song Exploder is about the artists themselves and what brought them to specific choices in their music; and The Allusionist is about why humans and cultures and societies have made language change in the way that it has changed.

In such, Everything Is Alive is a podcast that isn’t about humans, ostensibly. Ostensibly, it’s about anything but actual human interviewees. But even just two episodes in, it’s already proving to be one of the most humanistic podcasts to date.