Between Cannonball, Critics at Large, Pop Culture Happy Hour, A Bit Fruity, and countless others, there’s certainly no shortage of podcasts dedicated to dissecting our current cultural moment. But this moment is big. It’s complicated. Frankly, it could do with a lot of dissecting.
The latest to attempt the task is Pop Syllabus hosted by Christiana Mbakwe Medina, a writer on both The Daily Show and The Morning Show. Pop Syllabus started life as a Substack last Fall, where Mbakwe Medina writes thoughtful essays on pop cultural figures and movements. The podcast iteration started this January, with a look into ‘the dark side of Wellness’.
At the time of writing, the show is only seven episodes old, but has already exhibited impressive range — Pop Syllabus has covered issues like K-Beauty, “Disney Adults,” and the astrology boom, as well as the experiences of Rachel Lindsay, the first Black bachelorette. While the topics are relevant, they aren’t generally tied tightly to the news cycle, though it was certainly good timing that the interview with Wunmi Mosaku was released just a few days after she won a BAFTA for her performance in smash hit Sinners.
Not every episode has been a total winner so far. The conversation with academic Margaret Gaida on astrology made a lot of assumptions about the listener’s investment in the field and offered very little substance in return. Later, Mbakwe Medina appears to conflate having a belief in astrology with being gluten intolerant. Not the show’s finest hour, to put it both literally and metaphorically.
But, to date at least, that has proven an anomaly. It’s a real tribute to Pop Syllabus that, in general, even the episodes that aren’t instantly appealing are made interesting by the vast terrain the conversations cover. Perhaps the best example of this is the K-Beauty episode, where guest Elise Hu offered an enlightening contextualisation of the way that beauty fits in with all the other South Korean exports that have dominated the global culture over the last decade or so, like movies and pop music. And in the instalment on Disney Adults, Robbie Whelan added both corporate knowhow and compassionate dimension to his portrait of the much-mocked group.
Pop Syllabus also excels at the episodes which are centered on celebrity guests. The conversation Mbakwe Medina had with Wunmi Mosaku was made particularly delightful by them sharing a very specific cultural background as Black British women from Nigerian families who now live and work in the US. The interview with Jeff Hiller, who became famous in his late forties for his role in HBO’s Somebody, Somewhere, was also a winner; charming and funny, with insightful hard-won ruminations on finding success in your chosen field much later than anticipated.
Fittingly for a show with such a slew of interests, Mbakwe Medina is a versatile host, able to slide from the more serious academic stuff to gossipy laughs fairly seamlessly. Although she does have a tendency to talk over her guests a little too much, this feels more of a testament to the podcast’s conversational nature — friends talk over each other in conversation, and it often seems as if Mbakwe Medina and her guests have become friends by the end of their chat. In cultural interview podcasts with a wide-ranging purview, without any particular bits or gimmicks to separate them from the crowd, the warmth of the host is particularly vital. Mbakwe Medina has it in abundance.
Her guests think so too: “See, the world did need another podcast host,” Jeff Hiller said to Mbakwe Medina at the end of his episode, referencing an earlier self-deprecating comment about the crowded market she was entering into. “Because you’re good.”
She is. And with such an array of topics covered when the show is still very much in its infancy, it will be fascinating to see where she takes Pop Syllabus next.
¤
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.