Vital stats:
Format: transatlantic Skype conversations
Duration: ~30m
Frequency: weeklyish
Archive available on iTunes: all
Something about this project doesn’t sit quite right with me, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you exactly what. Like the previously Podthought-about Arrive Having Eaten (which now appears to be podfading), My Favorite Stranger [RSS] [iTunes] is assembled from Skype conversations between a fella and a lady who have never met. But while Arrive Having Eaten’s Ben and Erica eventually crossed paths in real life, My Favorite Stranger’s Ahm [sic] and Craig have declared their intentions to avoid each other in the meatspace entirely. Easy vow to make, one assumes, since Ahm’s in Los Angeles and Craig’s somewhere in Holland.
Yet I am still kind of weirded out. Again, there’s no articulable reason why this format seems vaguely unsavory. All available evidence suggests this particular podcast is totally and utterly un-unsavory. Having collided in some sort of highly amiable internet argument — highly amiable by internet standards, anyway — Ahm and Craig came to discover that, despite substantial differences of location, nationality, education, and gender, they’ve got the same set of physiological quirks and psychological neuroses deep down. They’re both Myers-Briggs INTPs. They both have unusually wide feet. They’re both socially anxious. They both sweat profusely. Hands across the water!
This is actually kind of daring, in its way, since Ahm and Craig began recording their chats for podcasting purposes surprisingly early on in their e-friend/strangership. You get to hear them find things out about each other that, under other, more reasonable conditions, would have been assumed, already known, implied, or never, ever brought up at all. Given Craig’s English-ness and Ahm’s American-ness, there’s also plenty of opportunity for cross-cultural comparison and contrast. Sure, maybe we’re all the same sweaty, socially anxious, wide-footed INTPs under out different skins, but the inner similarities throw the differences into contrast and thus make them more interesting as well.
While I wouldn’t normally Podthink about a show under two months old with only five episodes to its name, My Favorite Stranger seems to have done an uncommonly efficient job of building a fandom. In a sense, this is perfectly understandable. Stripped of all the usual conversational crutches like local goings-on, national politics, nerd stuff, or even the weather, Ahm and Craig are forced to head straight to the bedrock of their humanity, which, dear readers, is the bedrock of all our humanity. This actually exemplifies a quality of which I’d like to see a great deal more in podcasting. I’m interested in learning about the people behind the mics, just like these hosts are interested in learning about one another. It’s a relief not to have to decoct epic soliloquies on Lost to do so.
Still, I can’t shake the unsettling twinge that comes from not being quite sure why they’re doing this. Though Ahm and Craig do use an episode to tell their “origin story” [MP3], confusion remains. Why would an Englishman and an Americawoman who barely even internet-know each other Skype so often in the first place? Does not compute. But maybe that’s the other part of their podcast’s appeal: we’re ceaselessly curious about that which we cannot quite explain. (Hence, I guess, all those other shows’ epic soliloquies on Lost.)
[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]