Every family has ghosts. Few people are brave enough to confront them head on. And even fewer face their past with humor and genuine open-mindedness.
Before this interview, I had never met comedian and podcaster Holly Brown. That was surprising, since we run in some similar circles. Like me, Brown is interested in how things get made. While honing her stand-up routine, she works in the podcast industry, helping other shows find their audience. Finally, she has launched her own debut show: Everybody Knows But Me. It's a narrative podcast series about her family, but it is also a vehicle for Brown to showcase her signature sense of humor. Her father worked in sitcoms, and if you're also an 80s and 90s kid, the references to this era of television are right on trend.
Just after the launch of the show, I spoke to Brown about making her first podcast and where she plans to take the show after it's well-received first outing.
Alice Florence Orr: Thanks for talking to me, Holly. You work in podcasting — what made you decide to actually make your own show?
Holly Brown: I work at a company called Tink Media. I’ve been there for almost four years, and in podcasting in general for about five. That’s kind of why I started — I know how to do this, so why am I not doing it? It’s been really rewarding to finally be able to do the thing in the industry that I love.
AFO: What came first: the desire to make a podcast, or the story?
HB: The story, by far. Working in podcasting, you see so many shows out there, and I didn’t want to make one unless I had something so unique that no one else could do it. Especially in stand-up comedy — if you’re a comedian entering that space, you’re competing with all these other comedians who have podcasts, so you need a really unique idea.
I was driving one day, listening to Inconceivable Truth, and I finished the series, sat down, and thought — wait, I have secret twin brothers I’ve never met. Should I make a podcast about this? It was a genuine eureka moment, in the middle of listening to another podcast.
AFO: And what’s the process been like compared to writing stand-up? Comedy notoriously requires so many different takes and testing material on people. Which do you find harder?
HB: This is harder, by far. When I talk about my family on stage, I’m in total control of what I’m sharing — I’m giving people little glimpses of my life, and even with heavier material, I know you’re going to laugh at the end. I’m going to make you squirm a little, and then bring you back. With this, it’s that same thing on a much larger scale. And that’s still the goal — it wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t make you laugh about these really horrible things. But I’m not just in control of what I’m revealing; I’m purposely revealing everything this time. It’s a lot harder of a process. But I love that it’s exactly the lane I want to live in.
AFO: For people who haven’t listened yet — how do you describe Everybody Knows But Me? Is it comedy? True crime? A hybrid?
HB: I would say it’s very darkly funny. What I find fascinating about podcasting — and about studying human behavior — is that people will take away what they want to take away. If they’re looking to laugh, they’ll laugh a little more. If they’re looking for something true crime-adjacent, they’ll pick up on that. We have both. I find the same is true of my family: some people will have tremendous empathy for certain characters, and some won’t. It’s a fascinating study in how we watch sitcoms — studying them like an art form — and now incorporating that into the show.
AFO: Sitcoms feature so heavily in the show, both as inspiration and as part of the plot. Without giving too much away — can you speak to that relationship?
HB: My dad worked in sitcoms when I was younger — he worked on Frasier for its entire run. Growing up, sitcoms just kind of grew into my reality. I would drink coffee out of a mug that Frasier Crane had drunk coffee out of, eat dinner at a table I recognized from set. I lived my life so obsessed with them. And then I realized it was definitely a way of saying, “I’d like my life to be like that, please — 22 minutes, let’s wrap this up.” It became the natural lens through which to process my trauma, and this giant secret my dad kept from our family. I’m going to do it through these sitcom archetypes that I both wished my life was, and that let me analyze human behavior. Because yes, sitcom characters are oversimplified versions of people — but we do pull people into those boxes in real life, when we don’t want to look underneath. My family just happened to look the part: a little sitcom family. And now you know what’s hiding underneath.
AFO: It’s so true. I’ve also noticed such a trend of people revisiting media from the 90s and 2000s — the America’s Next Top Model documentary, Jennette McCurdy's memoir — this need to reflect on that era of television and the way people were portrayed on screen. Why do you think we’re having this reckoning?
HB: Once you go through each decade of sitcoms — from I Love Lucy all the way through — those shows don’t exist anymore in the same way. People can’t relate to them the way they once could. Back then, even if your life was falling apart, there were still some innocent things to hold onto. People don’t have a lot of those anymore. The nostalgia we crave is for a life that did exist but doesn’t quite anymore.
I wanted people to be able to step into my family’s world and feel like they were really in it. It’s a combination of now and then: here’s what I grew up thinking life could be, this optimistic, beautiful land, and here’s what I know now. I wanted it to be a comfort listen, even though it’s inherently uncomfortable. If I can bring in something people already know as comfort, they have the safety to then be uncomfortable within it.
AFO: That’s something I’ve noticed in podcasting generally — whenever I ask people what their comfort listens are, they’ll often say a grimy true crime show that contextually should be distressing but isn’t. There’s something about the ability to reflect on uncomfortable things at a remove. That’s really what struck me about your show: it’s a wild story on one level, but it’s also very human and very relatable.
HB: When I tell people the premise — my dad had secret twin sons who were discovered when I was 17, and my whole family kept it from me — I always get the same reaction. People lean in, look around, and then say: “My uncle had a secret family.” Or, “My grandfather was a travelling salesman, where do I begin?” Everyone feels that collective shame, even though why would I feel shame? This had nothing to do with me. I had no control over it. But I felt an instant connectivity when I opened up about it. That’s only become more common now that DNA testing is a thing. It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s rewarding when I find out about other people’s secret families. I’m like: yes. Keep it coming. I want to hear a weirder one than mine.
AFO: I’ve seen the show everywhere. How has the response been?
HB: Really good. The response from my own family has been unexpected, in the best way. It’s funny — people say they don’t know if they’ll listen, and then the show comes out and they always listen. Now I’m on the other side of what I experience as a true crime listener: watching people I love process this week by week. And I’ve been getting a lot of messages from strangers saying things like, “You’re really making me want to talk to my dad.” I love that. But I’m not here to prescribe. If you walk away thinking, “This reminds me of something my mum did and I never want to speak to her again” — that’s 100% acceptable. I’ve had that experience too. If you come away saying, “I want to learn more before I make my decision” — that’s my takeaway. I needed every bit of information before I could decidedly say how I felt about my family. You want to love your parents; that’s just an innate human thing. And it’s okay if you don’t. But I wanted all the information first — and I ended up where I am: I love my parents, despite a lot.
AFO: That’s really fascinating to hear, given how many op-eds there are right now about kids cutting off their parents. It sounds like you wanted to reclaim the story and make it your own. Did making the podcast help you understand your family more?
HB: One thousand trillion percent. I don’t know that I would have ever had these conversations otherwise. Even a small piece of information can completely change the picture. Learning, for example, that when my dad found out he was having the twins, it was within months of receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis — I didn’t know that.
When someone has passed, you only paint them in positive lights; you don’t go back and look at those little nuances. Learning that about my dad just opened up my brain. Do I agree with the choices he made? I don’t know. But now I can look at him as such a human person and ask myself: what would I have done, with those two life-changing events happening at the same time? It allows you to really collect all the information about your own life. It might completely change the story you’d been telling yourself for years — and that’s exactly what it’s done for me. I see things completely differently now. I’m able to forgive people in my family in a way I wasn’t before, and I feel way more equipped to have difficult conversations.
AFO: It’s cliché, but podcasting really is an intimate medium, and it clearly has this special power. Do you think there will be a season two, or will you move onto a different topic entirely?
HB: We’re already transitioning. We have this 90s lens to the podcast — I’m a millennial, born in ‘92 — and after this season, we’re going to start talking to other people about their stories. The conceit is: alongside 90s sitcoms, if you were a kid staying home from school, what you were watching were 90s talk shows. So we’re moving into a kind of 90s talk show format. There are other shows that talk to people about family secrets, but I don’t know many that tackle it with equal parts comedy — where we’re going to discuss this horrific thing and then find a way to laugh throughout.
If you listen to my siblings and me, we could be talking about something truly devastating and then one of us goes, “But remember when the cat jumped in the pool?” — in the exact same conversation about our dad dying. I want to talk to other people about their stories under this framework: I’m going to handle your trauma with care. I want you to feel safe in the way you did in your own home, growing up watching TV. Safe enough to then be uncomfortable.
AFO: That’s lovely. And comedy as a vehicle for processing trauma is so undervalued. Before we finish — was there a question you felt I hadn’t asked?
HB: The format of the podcast, actually. The Guardian recently called it “an original, slightly uncomfortable listen with pure imagination,” and I was so grateful, because they really tapped into what it is. We start every episode with a cold open — like a sitcom cold open. If you’ve watched Full House, you’ll know there’s a scene at the start that’s slightly unconnected to the rest of the episode but tells you a lot about who these characters are. We do that about my life, with actors, fully designed to feel like a real sitcom you’re stepping into. And then throughout, we weave in sitcom elements: a really dark thing happens, and then there’s a Home Improvement sound effect. I don’t want you to know exactly where the comedy and darkness are going at any given moment — that tension is the point. It’s a true crime-adjacent story told in a way that looks like a sitcom but is completely the opposite underneath. I’m really proud of the format.
AFO: You’re not a celebrity entering this medium. You came in scrappy. Does that feel like a disadvantage, or does it sharpen your focus?
HB: Both, honestly. I didn’t come from generational wealth or the advantages that are so present in who gets attention right now. We are scrappy. But I’d never have been able to make this podcast if I didn’t truly understand and love the medium. When you listen to celebrity-led podcasts — and I listen to them, I love them, I’m obsessed with Amy Poehler’s podcast — the ones that work, you can tell the person genuinely loves podcasting. The ones that don’t, you feel that they don’t understand the ecosystem. What I want to showcase is: if you love this industry, you can do it too. You just have to really learn who a podcast listener is. It’s possible. It’s just a fight. I have a production company and a network behind me, which I know not everyone has — and it’s still a fight. I’m so proud we’ve been able to do it so far.
AFO: Narrative storytelling did get a little cookie cutter for a while there.
HB: It did. And when it gets cookie cutter, there are a million shows that sound the same. That’s why something like Love Is Blind stands out — it’s doing something different. My show has connections to the entertainment industry that let us toe that line: you still get a little bit of Hollywood, but this is a real person. And we factored that fatigue in from the beginning. We didn’t say, “No one wants this, we’re defeated.” We said, “We think this story is worth sharing” — and part of why we’re transitioning to a chat show format is so we can service where the medium is going while maintaining the authentic storytelling that’s the reason most people love podcasts in the first place. Narrative storytelling is still alive. We just all have to believe in it together.
Thank you to Holly Brown for talking to me about Everybody Knows But Me. I’m excited for Podcast Review readers to discover the show — I think it’s the perfect summer road trip binge.
