Fair play to Julia Louis-Dreyfus: she nailed the concept with Wiser Than Me. And then she leveraged her not insignificant celebrity clout and nailed the guests too. As she explains in the monologue that introduces the first episode, it was while watching a documentary about Jane Fonda that she was struck: We don’t hear enough about the lives of old women. “It is just stunning to me that old women are so easily dismissed and made invisible by our culture,” she says, and with the frankness of Veep’s thrillingly foul-mouthed Selena Meyer, throws in appropriate expletives to characterise her feelings on the matter. “Man, I want to hear from the old ladies,” she says and lo, a podcast was born.
As you can imagine, a podcast from the woman famous for her role as Elaine Benes in the long-running American sitcom Seinfeld, who then went on to win multiple Emmys for her portrayal of tiny cutthroat Meyer in Veep, has a whole team of producers behind it, not to mention a slew of advertisers eager to jump aboard. This makes for some slick audio production – there are experts on hand to swiftly address a barely perceptible audio hiccup during one interview. But there are also some notably lengthy interruptions where Louis-Dreyfus gamely reads ads from the show’s numerous sponsors. (Seriously – I don’t think I’ve ever heard ads this long on a podcast. It’s a lot.)
Even with a crack team of audio wizards on hand, though, there’s no preventing acts of God, as the first episode illustrates. Right in the midst of her Jane Fonda interview – and it’s a rollicking discussion about everything from vibrators to Katharine Hepburn’s competitive streak – Louis-Dreyfus loses power, and her colourful reaction is caught on tape, while Fonda, unaware, blithely continues her exposition on Lululemon to nobody. Not quite nobody, though, as a producer audibly steps in, a reminder that the Jane and Julia chinwag is more tightly shepherded than we might want to think. Still, its very inclusion – the tech fail, the freakout, the producer-saviour, the oblivious interviewee – is its own kind of honesty.
There’s an honesty too to the host’s patter: Louis-Dreyfus may not be the slickest interviewer nor even the funniest, but she’s disarmingly open about her experiences – her narcissistic father, her breast cancer diagnosis, losing a baby late in a pregnancy – and her guests respond with their own personal revelations.
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Designer Diane Von Furstenberg talks of her mother’s liberation from Auschwitz, weighing just 49 pounds
Author Isabel Allende confesses to abandoning her children for a lover at a low point in her life, an admission stunning in its self-indictment. (Allende’s advice, too, feels less canned than candid: get rid of all the relationships not worth keeping, which includes the boring ones, and take cannabis edibles for better senior sex.)
Designer Diane Von Furstenberg talks of her mother’s liberation from Auschwitz, weighing just 49 pounds; vocalist Darlene Love drops a story about singing all night with Elvis; writer Fran Lebowitz reveals her delight in exacting revenge on those who thwart her. And every episode ends with Dreyfus ringing her mom in a sweet nod to the matrilineal, though this can sometimes strain the spontaneity.
These old ladies have stories rich with history and artistic achievement and can drop both names and knowledge at a clip. But they’ve also battled a kind of misogyny that bears remembering, and they’re still at war. They’re mothers and daughters who make meals and clothes and sing and fight, and they know how to live a little. These wise women come bearing gifts of humour and intelligence and empathy. We’d be wise to listen up.
