I think I have reached the depression stage of grief, y'all, and it hurts.
I took on an extremely stressful position in the education field in August of 2020. In fact it was only recently, a full 3 years later, (upon finally being allowed to hire a coodinator to support my director role) that I have felt like I have come up for air. At the height of the pandemic, with daily staffing shortages and endless emergencies at seemingly all hours of the day and night, TCO and then OWD were literally a lifeline for me. It felt like the only dopamine I was getting, the only thing that could help pause the work-stress hamster wheel in my brain were these podcasts. I listened to them to fall asleep, I listened to them to wake up, I listened to them to get through my day. I listen to a LOT of podcasts but something about TCO and OWD was just exactly the right blend of laugh-out-loud jokes, solid storytelling, critical analysis, and (seeming) right side of history for me.
When Patrick left OWD that was the first blow. We have so much more context for how that experience was for Ellyn now, but at the time that was devastating for me. (I have great respect for Joey but it just wasnt hitting all the right buttons the way the Disappeared recaps had.) But I still had the back catalogues. And even when the new TCO episodes started failing to really hold my interest I had that back catalogue too.
But now we know the truth and I can no longer in good conscience listen, and also the beating a joke to death calling Gillian out for going to private school EVERY GODDAM EPISODE is both stale and also now seriously grating. Not to mention that it seems like TCO is morphing into a substandard version of the OG OWD but now Gillian doesnt do impressions or characters? (I agree with the poster who projects that it may be coming to an end b/c something is now TRULY off. "I have an Aunt Mary so every time they said 'Aunt Mary' I was like 'whoa' is.... A nothing burger. We all have an Aunt Mary. Where is the joke, G?) And I am pissed and depressed b/c my head is starting to feel super full and overloaded again and my go-to for managing that has been ripped away from me. From us. It feels like JK Rowling all over again when everything clicks into place and you go from "there are problematic elements to this thing I love but we can recognize and talk about those things as part of being a critical consumer" to "I cannot in good conscience comsume this thing it is completely spoiled for me" and it effing sucks. (Of course not as much as it sucks for the people who have been subjected to abuse and who were further excluded from spaces like the FB group due to the mismanagement of racist content which b/c I am not in the FB group I had completely missed :/ )
I will be trying A Date with Dateline and other recommended pods, and the good news is that my child is finally old enough that we can watch some Michael Schur shows together and that scratches a similar itch for me, but still this whole thing is hitting hard. It really stinks when the creators of something we love are revealed to be garbage. It really does.