Wilson.fm

This episode really came alive for me when we connected with the laugh track enthusiast community, who are a very small but wonderful group. There’s something very touching and humane about people who have such a monastic reverence for an object as little-loved as the laugh track. We also spent a lot of time tracking down one of the mythical laff boxes mentioned in this episode. We got very close to one—to the point we were trying to arrange a visit with the owner. But then it all fell apart when they asked that we pay thousands of dollars just to see the box. The episode ended up not needing it, but I’m still sad we never got to actually hear one.

We had no idea this episode was going to be about a Sherlock fan conspiracy until we were a couple weeks into production. Originally the episode was going to be about the concept of “shipping” characters together as couples, something Willa is fascinated by, but when the conspiracy around the John Watson/Sherlock Holmes pairing kept coming up in interviews, we knew we had to change focus. The Johnlock Conspiracy is our most popular episode so far, and still our most controversial. We got a lot of mail on this one, both positive and negative. Still, Willa and I are very proud of this one and the way we handled a very complicated story.

This one turned me from a skeptic into a believer. I always thought clowns were pretty lame, but this episode really made me consider them in a larger, fairer context. It turns out that clowns, and the people who are into clowns, are fascinating! We ended up having to turn this episode around in three weeks, and I think we did a good job all things considered. Very proud of having the interview with one of the clown panic perpetrators at the top of the show, he was tough to track down.

I had been wanting to do this story for years! The episode is about a woman who went on a VH1 dating show as a performance art piece, and I had read one of her blogs years ago, right around the time the show was wrapping up. I watched the show as it was airing, and I remember thinking that there was something off about Ann—that she was up to something. I was thrilled to learn that I was right, and always remembered it as this very funny and oddly moving story about art and social performance. We tried several times to talk to Frank (the bachelor on the show), but he was really hard to pin down. I can’t blame Frank for wanting to move beyond his reality TV days, though.

I feel so lucky to work on a show that allowed me to make this episode. Before I worked at Slate, I pitched a version of this story to some big name shows with no luck. To be fair, it’s a weird, hard sell about a soft spoken character, the nature of nostalgia, and childhood expressions of queerness. Originally I wanted it to be a much more ethereal sounding episode with more minimal narration, but Willa, in her wisdom, pulled us back from that precipice. I think we have a good balancing act in that respect—Willa tamps down my more indulgent experimental inclinations and I think I push the show towards something a little more complicated and less traditional, structurally.

This episode was really tough. We probably interviewed more people for it than any other episode, but it was still hard to find the same kind of enthusiasm from people about hotel art that you can about clowns, paper dolls, or even the laugh track. I think of this episode as being an example of the podcast we thought we were making when we first started the show, but as we’ve moved in a more character-driven direction, this one feels a little dry in comparison. Still, I think we ended up pulling back the curtain on a weird little detail of modern life, and I love Willa’s back-and-forth about the nature of art at the end.

Such a shame we lost our original episode due to advertiser trouble. If only there was some way for listeners to figure out a way into the Aleph Mattresses website and unlock it. That episode is on their site somewhere, I’m sure of it. Let us know if you manage to find it: Decoderring@slate.com