Content Consumed: Succession, fake podcasts, and the Australian Grand Prix

Good morning! It’s Monday and I’m tired after a long but heartwarming weekend in Seattle with my wonderful extended family. Happy April!

In today’s edition of Content Consumed:
🍸 Succession episode 2 recap and review
🌶 Hustling the Internet with fake podcast clips
🏎 The messy Australian Grand Prix has F1 fans in a tizzy

Succession: Season 4, Episode 2 Recap and Review

Episode 2 of Season 4 of Succession was, as expected, a banger.

Connor Roy is getting married, but no one really gives a shit. His siblings make it quite obvious, actually, that they do not give a shit. They’ve got other things going on.

For example, Shiv is experiencing what it’s like (again) to be up against her father. Logan has even helped Tom get all the best divorce lawyers in NYC to freeze Shiv out. Shiv, like Kendall, is now 100% in the spite game. PGN was always a spite play, but manipulating the board takes things further.

So anyways, the siblings hit up a karaoke bar at Connor’s request, Logan surprises them there (with Kerry…) as they’re talking business, and sort-of-but-not-actually apologizes? He apologizes for taking their helicopter away at least. The kids keep asking him: what is he sorry for?

Then he blows up and tells them they’re “not serious people”, one of the most devastating insults of Succession history.

In a shock to no one: Roman has already crawled back to daddy by the end of the episode. Even though he took their helicopter away! That’s because Roman—who in this episode, told his siblings “it’s okay, everyone hit me because I was fucking annoying”—is broken.

Like Connor, who also delivers a devastating: “The good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is you learn to live without it.” The kids, as I mentioned last week, are still not okay and will never be okay.

Greg is always our perfect comic relief, doing an absolutely awful job of telling Kerry that she’s a shitty news anchor and they can’t put her in primetime. An act of diplomacy more important than Israel-Palestine, as Tom puts it.

There’s more—read my full recap and review here.

Trending: Podcast clips from fake shows

Last week, a clip went viral of a woman—supposedly on a podcast—talking about… something a bit explicit. Watch if you want here.

You would think, from this clip, that this is a highlight from a podcast. The subtitles, the camera angle, the microphone she’s speaking into, the supposed other person she’s talking to.

Nope!

Not a podcast!

It’s part of a trend amongst content creators who set up a microphone and talk into it as if it were a podcast, and then turn the footage into short TikTok clips to promote whatever they’re hustling, which is never an actual podcast, as reporter Ryan Broderick shed light on in this column.

The woman in the video is actually promoting her OnlyFans account. Victoria Banxx is a porn star, not a podcaster, but she expertly drew thousands of new users to her profiles with her clip—fully clothed, speaking into a fake mic, for a fake podcast, to no one—going viral. The video has been retweeted thousands of times and viewed tens of millions of times and there’s also a viral TikTok audio of it.

Genius. Fascinating. Tricking people on the Internet is easier than ever, folks! Just look at the Biden and Trump AI bits (and those ones actually scare me, tbh. I just know all the Boomers are falling for it).

The (very messy) Australian Grand Prix

Oh boy, was that a shitshow or what?

Three red flags. I stayed up til 1 a.m. for THREE RED FLAGS and some absurd penalties, wild crashes, and a handful of DNFs. It was worth it, I’ll say, for the entertainment value. But in full honesty, I don’t know if it looks good for Formula 1.

It shouldn’t be THIS complicated. It should be somewhat complicated, but this was a lot. When even the commentators are struggling to understand why the last lap of a race is essentially a formation lap behind a safety car with no overtakes allowed, there’s a problem for the whole audience.

Other highlights (and lowlights) from the race:

• Max won, easily, of course.
• Charles Leclerc will apparently never have a fun race for the rest of his life and Ferrari is eternally cursed. A lap-one DNF is tough.
• There’s controversy over Carlos Sainz’s 5-second time penalty given in the last lap: some think others should have suffered penalties too, some think it was too harsh considering it completely displaced him from points since the last lap was funky, and some think it was poorly communicated overall.
• The heavy crash between the Alpine cars, with drivers Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon, spells trouble for the already-disgruntled Frenchmen. We know these two teammates don’t like each other and this will not improve domestic relations.
• George Russell’s car caught fire, and that was a little scary and exciting.
• Checo was voted Driver of the Day for his excellent maneuvering from the pit lane to P5. It probably helps when 8 cars DNF…

And that’s all for today! Big April goal: hit 500 followers. That’d be sweet. Help me get there—share this column with friends and family who love talking about television, movies, pop culture, music, podcasts, sports and more.

Love ya!
Casey

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