Best Brothers Ever ™... Now
Your favorite podcast is back. This is why we went on hiatus.
Just in case you didn’t receive the Apple News push notification: here is a brand new episode of my brother Joel and I’s iconic podcast, Best Brothers Ever ™.
In our first episode in six years, we cover Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me…Now — her autofictional tour de force that somehow weaves together Jane Fonda, Puerto Rican mythology, astrology, Marxist Jews, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
In honor of our comeback, I will share with you the never-before-seen story of why the first season of Best Brothers Ever ™ abruptly came to a close.
It’s 2018. I’m pretty much the same person. After years of watching stupid TV shows together, Joel and I decide to rent a comedy recording studio in Koreatown for $40 an hour and tape Best Brothers Ever™, a podcast delving into Celebreality — the wonderful era of Vh1 reality TV that includes Smithsonian Museum worthy gems such as Flavor of Love, I Love New York, Rock of Love, Charm School, and Frank The Entertainer In A Basement Affair.
At first, despite the recording studio lacking air conditioning in the midst of a blazing summer, things were going splendidly. Best Brothers Ever™ gained a cult following, consisting mainly of my parents, sister, and a few friends who, as far as I know, genuinely cared.
Was it a whopping success? No. But what it did was give my brother, who is quite talented at radio, and I a chance to work on a project together and see how we can package our banter into a more digestible format.
In 2018, just as how it is now, the media landscape was quite scary. I was freelancing and recently got fired from a gig writing copy for a hair transplant surgeon in Redondo Beach. Creating a silly podcast from scratch was a way to bypass the gatekeepers and also, just have some freakin’ fun!
But, we still wanted some buzz for the podcast and so, launched a Twitter account. At the end of each episode, after the fan favorite segment “Bing Me Daddy” (we “Binged” the whereabouts of Vh1 C-Listers to comply with the demands of our sponsor/daddy, Bing), we half-heartedly asked listeners to tweet us their burning questions. This is where I will hold myself accountable: I volunteered to be in charge of this Twitter account and failed miserably.
I can assign blame to various people and faceless entities: an anxious attachment style relationship dynamic that had scrambled my priorities, this app called Scruff, some freelance assignments, forgetting the password over and over and over again, until I asked myself whether this Twitter account was necessary. Despite all these excuses, the fact remains: I promised my brother that I would regularly post on Twitter and engage with our 10 fans and I did not.
My perpetual inability to complete this simple task became a contentious topic. But things were mostly fine until our episode in which we had a phone interview with Ann Hirsch, an artist who went undercover on Frank The Entertainer In A Basement Affair as part of a conceptual art project.
If you’re a Best Brothers Ever ™ super fan, you may have noticed that the 34 minute episode is shorter than the rest of the episodes which averaged around the 50 minute mark (our new episode is over 90 minutes because Democracy Dies in Darkness).
Why was this episode so brief? What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton?
Well, we got into a giant fight in the middle of recording.
Joel and I were shvitzing buckets in the studio, trading quips about Frank The Entertainer In A Basement Affair, one of the more bizarre entries in the Celebreality canon, and then he mentioned our Twitter account and asked, while we were recording, whether I had been posting. My voice got shaky and I coughed up some excuses and empty promises.
He then went in for the kill — Daniel, why don’t you put that English degree to use and post on our Twitter account?
(Very Important Clarification: I actually got my BA in History, writing a thesis chronicling the concept of subjectivity in the aesthetics of Maoist and Post-Maoist China. But since my thesis also analyzed Maoist and Post-Maoist fiction and I proceeded to pursue a career in writing, I can see where the confusion stemmed from.)
Still recording, and in the presence of some comedy dude producer who managed our microphones, I barked back — That isn’t cool! That’s not a nice thing to say. You know what? Stop recording. I’M DONE.
To which my brother responded — What? We can’t just stop recording! You can’t quit all of a sudden. What the hell?
I turned to the producer — Stop recording us! Cut our microphones!
The producer was silent, engulfed in sweat that was probably triggered from witnessing two adults scream at each other.
Joel shouted — Come on, you can’t just quit when the jokes aren’t going your way. And then I just did that, I got up, threw my headphones on the table, and quit. We calmed down because in five minutes, we were supposed to call Ann Hirsch to interview her about how she hijacked a Vh1 show for performance art.
To our credit, we acted professionally throughout the call. Ann Hirsch was lovely to talk to. But the fight continued into the parking lot of the comedy studio and we stopped recording Best Brothers Ever ™. We never got to discuss I Love Money or Megan Wants A Millionaire. We never got to give our couple dozen fans, or ourselves, closure. To the dismay of our messier followers, the raw fight was edited out of the episode. Yes, there’s a meta-element of a reality TV recap podcast going off the rails.
Joel was very nervous about me writing this essay. He sent me the Spoon song “Don’t Make Me A Target.” That’s not my intention at all.
Now that I have devoted a whole Substack post to the incident, I can conclude that we were both in the wrong. He was a little sassy and I was a big baby, unable to post on Twitter and also, unable to spin a mild joke about my liberal arts degree into comedic banter. Part of me didn’t take the podcast seriously because we didn’t have thousands of listeners. Of course, that’s lame; we were having fun and that’s what should have mattered. It’s sad that a garden-variety fight led to the death of our passion project.
Joel and I have always shared the same fascination with the worst cultural artifacts ever. As kids, he would walk in on me binge-watching Intervention, concerned but also amused that I was so fixated on one of the most depressing TV programs of all time. Not many people can say they have genuine rapport with a sibling. Some brothers bond over expanding a Texan oil empire. Some brothers bond over trying to ascend to the White House so they can enrich their pals in the Military-industrial Complex. Some brothers bond over how an insurgent populist movement has rendered their brand of “compassionate conservatism” irrelevant. Oh wait, I keep referencing the Bush Brothers.
Well, Joel and I bond over how our parents didn’t really know what we were watching, didn’t really know that our personalities were becoming irreparably damaged by trash television.
So, I’m grateful to Jennifer Lopez for encouraging Joel and I to get back into the studio, discuss her chaotic love life, and finally, put my knowledge of Post-Maoist aesthetics to good use.
Ladies and gentlemen, I now present: The Best Brothers Ever ™.