Good Hang: Amy Poehler joins the throngs of celebrity podcasts

Hey, did you hear? Amy Poehler has a podcast now.

It’s called Good Hang with Amy Poehler and it’s coming in March on Spotify. There’s no particular theme or gimmick, it’s the promise of Poehler sharing stories from her life, interviewing other famous people and sharing a laugh.

Her philosophy seems to be, as she described it on Instagram, “It’s rough out there, we’re just trying to lighten it up a little”.

When she made the announcement this week on the US Today show, Poehler said, “I checked and I’m officially the last person to not have a podcast, so I figured I’d jump in”.

She’s not the last but Poehler, the star of Inside Out, Parks and Recreation and Saturday Night Live, is certainly not the first.

Celebrity podcasts have become a lucrative business. For some, if you get the mix and the vibe correct, it’ll become more “successful” than the primary thing they were known for.

Poehler should know. Her ex-husband, Will Arnett, is one-third of one of the biggest stories in the space. Arnett, along with Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes, started the Smartless podcast during the pandemic as a way to combat boredom and depression.

Over the five years, Smartless is now bigger, as they themselves say, anything they’ve done on screen. One presumes Hayes’ Will & Grace residuals is handsome, but it is hard to compete with the $US100 million deal the trio signed last year with SiriusXM.

That’s on top of their previous agreement with Amazon’s Wondery, which they inked in 2021 for reportedly between $US60 million and $SU80 million.

Their early guests included famous friends such as Jennifer Aniston and Maya Rudolph and since then, it’s been a steady roster of huge names, ranging from George Clooney and Paul McCartney to, once, the triple bill of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

There were live shows with drop-ins from David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, which was also filmed for a docuseries on HBO Max, and loads and loads of merch. A Smartless zip-up hoodie will set you back $US189.95 but a holographic sticker is only five bucks.

It’s more intimate and much looser than traditional celebrity profiles, giving fans and listeners an opportunity for an authentic connection. It also removes the mystique, as Arnett, Bateman and Hayes rib each other for past professional failures, their personal traumas and junk food habits.

Stars! They’re just like us!

There are still celebrities, Marlon Brando wannabe-types, who don’t want that veil between us and them to drop. Some of them will say super serious things like how if we know too much, then all we’ll see of their next role is them, and not, say, Frankenstein’s monster.

The ones who do are making bank, and they’re setting the agenda of what their story is. Social media has given celebrities a chance to directly connect with their fans, without the filter of traditional media, and podcasts supercharge it.

It also keeps them relevant and in the zeitgeist, without constantly hustling for roles in a fickle industry.

Maybe it’s easier for actors that primarily work in comedy to lean into “relatable”, which explains the roster of talent that have their own podcasts – Anna Faris, Ted Danson, June Diane Raphael, Jason Mantzoukas, Paul Scheer, Bowen Yang, Kate and Oliver Hudson, Rob Lowe, David Spade, Dana Carvey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

But they’re not always. Kerry Washington invites celebrities to talk about the street they grew up on while Paul Giamatti weaponises his mellifluous voice and fascination with weird things on Chinwag, which is co-hosted by writer and academic Stephen Asma as they delve into the possibility of aliens, the Mothman and shipwrecks. Idris Elba and his wife Sabrina had one interviewing successful partnerships.

Then there are the queens of personal branding – Oprah, Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow. If Paltrow never acted again, her fans would not care, as long as she was being completely her unapologetically privileged, bonkers and wonderful self. Jade eggs and all.

For interview subjects, as in, other famous people, it’s also easier to open up to someone they think understand them, and they’re not on guard as they would be with a journalist.

When Poehler posted Good Hang on Instagram, the video spliced in some well-wishers including Arnett, who said it was “awesome” that she was doing a podcast. Another came from Dax Shepard, who has been hosting Armchair Expert since 2018 and has posted over 800 episodes.

On screen, Shepard’s best known roles are TV version of Parenthood and, maybe, CHiPs and Without a Paddle. He hasn’t really acted since 2020 but Armchair Expert has been consistently in the top 10 podcasts in the US.

When Smartless launched, it’s no coincidence Shepard was its first guest. He also gave Poehler some advice, “Just be yourself and the guests will come”.

“Be yourself” (or at least the best public version of yourself) seems to be the mantra, and listeners can’t get enough.