The new road to TV fame may be that lowliest form of the internet age, the podcast.
The latest comes tonight when “Stuff You Should Know” (Science, 10 p.m.) bringing the podcast of the same name with its originators Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant. The odd thing about the mockumentary style series is that while going for the deadpan comedy, it goes against the one thing that made them stand out in the first place: science facts.
Clark told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour “It takes our real life podcast — we’re real life podcasters! — and all of the real life information involved, and we kind of plot it down in this fictionalized world, fictionalized version of our world.”
Bryant said, “About half of them were podcasts we had already recorded, and then the other half we’re going to record to release in conjunction with the episodes.”
“From a network point of view, the great wealth of podcasts that are out there just is another casting opportunity,” Science Channel general manager Debbie Myers says. “But you’ve got to be true to what it is that makes that podcast fantastic and not try and take personalities and invent them into something that they’re not. So it’s a tricky, tricky experiment to do.”
The network is pairing it with another thing that grew out of a podcast: Karl Pilkington’s “An Idiot Abroad” (Science, 9 p.m.). Pilkington was the subject of Ricky Gervais’ popular podcast and will be paired for the third and final season with another person he champions — Warwick Davis of “Life’s Too Short.