Podcrushed review — podcast relives the mortification of school years

Is there a celebrity left who doesn’t have a podcast? Actors, musicians, ex-politicians, royals — like offshore bank accounts, they’ve all got them. While I have no desire to hear famous people prattling to their famous friends about being famous — can’t they just pick up the phone instead? — I am more receptive to celebrity-hosted podcasts with a clear focus. So my ears pricked up when I heard about Podcrushed, a new series in which Penn Badgley, star of the television series Gossip Girl and You, plus co-hosts Nava Kavelin and Sophie Ansari, hear variously poignant, funny and mortifying stories from listeners and guests about their school years.

The first episode opens with Badgley reading out a story submitted by a Texan woman who developed a crush on a boy at school that rendered her speechless in his presence. When she saw him approaching in the playground, she took the only possible course of action: she faked a heart attack. That day, she says, she learnt a valuable lesson: “While it may be romantic to die for love, it’s never cool to play dead in front of your crush.”

The second and most recent episode opens with a similarly agonising story about a seventh grader who went to the school dance alone and got carried away on the dancefloor to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”. “At some point my eyes close, my head is thrown back and I’m singing at the top of my lungs . . . My limbs are flailing, I’m headbanging. Who knows what my feet are doing?”, she writes. When the song ended, she opened her eyes to find the entire school staring at her.

The pain of adolescence, with the attendant heartbreak and alienation, proves fertile ground for storytelling. Along with listener stories, the hosts and guests look back on their own childhood struggles. The second episode features Drew Barrymore, whose career as an actor began when she appeared in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. at the age of six. She reveals how fame at such a young age and her role as family breadwinner led to teenage rebellion and a distrust of authority.

The series isn’t without its teething problems. I’ve yet to hear a podcast with three hosts that doesn’t sound like a slightly sozzled party conversation, with too-loud laughter and people talking over one another. There are moments in the opening episode, which features actor Leighton Meester, that are pure chaos as everyone talks at once. But it’s early days for Podcrushed and these are problems a ruthless producer could easily fix.

Storytime with Seth Rogen is another celebrity-hosted series with a clear format as it asks guests to tell a high-stakes tale that reveals something about themselves. There is no room for rambling here, and smart storytelling means that no episode ends up where you think it will.

apple.com/apple-podcasts; earwolf.com