We talk to the brains behind Peabody Awards-recognized TV programs and how their shows are shaping our culture and reimagining the future.
Jeffrey Jones, Executive Director of the Peabody Awards, dives into the topic of men’s mental health with guests Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein. Bill Lawrence is the showrunner and creator of the Peabody-award winning series, Scrubs and Ted Lasso, as well as the current Apple+ hit Shrinking. His series have a central focus on the importance of male friendships in redefining traditional masculinity and on the importance of community to healing and building healthy relationships. Brett Goldstein is a writer, performer, and comedian who writes and stars in Ted Lasso as the gruff but bighearted Roy Kent and co-created Shrinking with Bill Lawrence and appears in the second season as the drunk driver responsible for the death of the protagonist’s wife.
We are back for season 2. Join us as we talk to the risk takers that help reinvent and reimagine the kinds of stories we see on TV and who disrupt what we’ve come to expect on our screens and in our culture. We Disrupt This Broadcast, a podcast from The Peabody Awards and Center for Media & Social Impact is produced and distributed in partnership with award-winning audio production group PRX and hosted by comedian Gabe González. We Disrupt This Broadcast explores how the minds behind critically-acclaimed TV shows are re-imagining the world and tackling the big issues that move us forward. From intimate interviews with award-winning TV creatives to real talk with experts and social movement leaders, join us as we explore the inner workings and cultural significance of the shows that are changing all the rules and shaping our future. Listen to We Disrupt This Broadcast - back for its second season on February 6th. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode of We Disrupt this Broadcast, Gabe González introduces us to the Peabody Award-winning series, Bluey, an outstanding animated children’s show that has become renowned as the best family co-viewing experience. WDTB Executive Producer Caty Borum interviews creator and writer Joe Brumm about how he developed a series that is funny, heartwarming, realistic (despite its dog characters), and tackles some of life’s toughest issues in each 7-minute episode. They discuss the power of play in the lives of children (and adults), the strategy to make both parents and kids laugh and why it’s important to have a girl character lead the show. Gabe then chats with The Read host and podcasting legend Crissle, a vocal Bluey fan, about what makes the series so disruptive, changing the way we see children’s television.
In this episode, we ask the question, “Why is normalizing the experiences of adolescence, especially for young girls, so disruptive?” Caty Borum, WDTB Executive Producer and Executive Director for the Center for Media & Social Impact, interviews legendary author and disruptor Judy Blume, author of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, Blubber, Forever, and the center of the recent Peabody Award-winning documentary about her life, Judy Blume Forever. Caty and Judy discuss her inspiration, using writing to find a way to a better life, puberty as a time to celebrate girlhood, and finding community through fighting book bans. After their interview, Caty speaks with Chelsey Goodan, author of Underestimated: The Wisdom and Power of Teenage Girls, about the untapped power of teenage girls and the importance of feeling seen.
Host Gabe González speaks with Ron Nyswaner, creator of Peabody-Award winning historical romance, Fellow Travelers. In a far-reaching, in-depth conversation, Gabe and Ron discuss the evolution of gay identity, how to write complex queer characters, and why foot-licking scenes are an important part of getting young folks interested in queer history. After their interview, Gabe dives deeper into the history of queer representation on TV with documentary filmmaker and professor Katherine Sender.
In this episode, host Gabe González introduces us to the loving, incisive, and decidedly off-beat humor of Somebody Somewhere, a show that is redefining home, friendship, family, and even traditional narrative structure. He interviews the series’ stars Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller and they discuss the importance of making friends after 40, found family, why queerness and faith are not contradictory, and how platonic love can sometimes be the one that helps us become fully ourselves.
Gabe González has an intimate and wide-ranging conversation with Bobby Wilson and Ryan Redcorn, writers on the two-time Peabody Award-winning show Reservation Dogs. They talk about the groundbreaking series, which features an all Native cast and crew, and how an all-Native writers’ room contributes to the accurate representation of reservation life on screen. Gabe is then joined by Dr. Philip Deloria, Native historian, to talk about the alternately hilarious and horrifying path for Native representation on TV, why flawed characters are important, and why Native folks might be the funniest people you’ll ever meet.
In this episode, we ask the question, “Why are women in midlife somehow still the ultimate taboo in this industry?” Caty Borum, Executive Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact, interviews Pamela Adlon, the creative powerhouse behind the Peabody Award-winning series Better Things, and director of the feature film Babes. Caty and Pamela discuss disrupting the narratives around women in midlife, menopause having an “it girl” moment and the necessity of divorce doulas. They also dive into her commitment to mentoring the next generation of women creators.
In this episode, Peabody Awards executive director Jeffrey Jones interviews Black Mirror’s showrunner and creator Charlie Brooker. They discuss the importance of interrogating technology’s role in our life, disrupting the “tech as savior” narrative, the way both satire and sci-fi imagine our potential (and potentially disastrous) futures and the clash between the ideals of technology and our very human flaws. In the second half, Gabe González talks to tech journalist Carole Cadwalladr about the limitations of journalism to affect change, and the importance of entertainment narratives such as Black Mirror to help the public see and understand the imminent dangers posed by a world increasingly shaped by “Big Tech.”
In this episode, we ask the question, “Can faith help us find our place in an increasingly broken world?” Comedian and host Gabe González connects with Ramy Youssef over how he’s used his career in stand-up comedy to push boundaries around taboo subjects like religion and as a catalyst for his show Ramy. They dig into Ramy’s three-dimensional portrayal of an Egyptian, Muslim-American family in all their flaws and the way faith influences each character’s arc in profound ways. After the interview, Gabe sits down with Arij Mikati, Managing Director of Culture Change at Pillars Fund and consultant on Ramy to dig into the importance of showing an array of flawed, funny, fundamentally human Muslim Americans and how the women of Ramy are moving the conversation forward.
In the first episode of We Disrupt This Broadcast, we ask the question, what's to be gained from examining collective trauma? Host Gabe González dives deep in his extensive interview with Damon Lindelof to explore this question, which has pervaded his work for nearly twenty years, from 2004’s Lost to 2023’s Mrs. Davis. We also get into how Lindelof has worked with his fellow creatives to broaden his work beyond his personal experience into the ways trauma affects our culture through religion, race, and even AI.