Official TV show podcasts are all the rage

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https://www.theverge.com/23157885/tv...bannon-spotify

"Chances are, if there is a show you love (or hatewatch), there is a recap podcast for it. And the studios have caught wise," says Ariel Shapiro. "A few years ago, studios started making their own 'official' podcasts as companions to their shows, and today, it can feel like every show is getting one: podcasts for Hacks, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and The Staircase debuted in just the past month. Producers say these shows are relatively easy to make, and they’ve become powerful marketing tools for studios, regularly hanging out at the top of Apple and Spotify’s TV & Film charts, and occasionally cracking the top 100 overall. Companion podcasts aren’t the same as the homegrown stuff — they often have higher production values and bigger stars, thanks to their studio budgets, and they don’t exactly turn a critical eye to the source material. But listeners are still eating them up." Michael Gluckstad, HBO Max’s director of podcast content, says of the explosion of official TV show podcasts: “Podcasting affords us to go a lot deeper, and I think do so in a way that is cost-effective. Behind the scenes videos are expensive, you need entire film crews to do it … We put a lot of work into our podcasts and we do a lot of production on them. But comparatively, it’s nothing like videos.”