Talk To The Audience?!? - September 2026

Bob Mackey (0:16)

Ahoi hoi everybody, and welcome to Talk to the Audience, where this is always death. I am one of your hosts, Bob Mackey, currently occupying the empty Simpsons writing room, and who is here with me today, as always?

Henry Gilbert (0:25)

Watching Stephen Root's acceptance speech on a loop, Henry Gilbert.

Bob Mackey (0:29)

And yes, this is Talk to the Audience, and on this podcast, we go over what's happening in the Simpsons world, what's happening in our world, and then we spend the rest of the podcast responding to your questions and comments from the last round of episodes posted to the Patreon. And I realized that some people might be new listeners, and they might be wondering like, what is up with Talk to the Audience? Why do you guys do it? Well, I feel like the sentence I always say up front does give enough context, but if you want full disclosure, and I think we should do this every time to time, Talk to the Audience is an easier podcast for us to do at the end of a month, after the end of a very long month full of lots of podcasts. And this typically goes live the same week we release a five to six hour episode of What a Cartoon Movie on the Patreon. So it is nice to have a slightly easier podcast to do every month, but I also want to point out that this also takes a lot of notes, a lot of research, a lot of homework, cover arts, a description, an editor, and so on and so on. So it's not just me and Henry shooting the shit. As much as I'd love to do something like that, I feel like there is no space for that on our podcast network, because everybody expects so much of us and I'm glad because I think we've raised the bar for ourselves successively over the years as to how much work we put into this thing.

Henry Gilbert (1:34)

The listeners who've been with us since the start of the Patreon, at least, may remember the Talk to the Audience got started as just a simpler bonus podcast that we would do just for patrons at the end of the month. And it really was pretty much only a little bit of catch up about our lives and then reading comments from it, and it just grew over time to be so much fully featured, especially talking about new episodes and other news in the month, that it became big enough that it's like, well, this should just be a full episode in our feed instead. And also lighten up our, at least, not needing to find a guest for a regular episode, too. That also made it easier, yeah.

Bob Mackey (2:13)

And as much as we love living in the past, we also feel obligated to cover what's happening in The Simpsons now, because The Simpsons is still very relevant. There's going to be another movie out, and it helps us stay current with The Simpsons. We don't want to be the fans who only watched up until 1998 and then called it a day. We want to have a thorough knowledge of The Simpsons past, present, and future.

So that's why we're doing this as well, just to let you know. Even if you're tapped out yourself, and that's fine, here's what's going on you might be missing. You might feel motivated to check in if we tell you a new episode is actually good.

Henry Gilbert (2:42)

Yeah, or if there was a brand new interview where somebody tells a story you haven't heard a million times before, or a new season of a Simpsons related series is coming out soon. There's always tons of fun stuff to discover. I think both of us really enjoy even doing the news research in the days ahead of the recording because just in this list here, I found like four things that I hadn't heard about before naturally just by searching for Simpsons News online.

Bob Mackey (3:10)

It's a surprisingly busy news month and a few of these stories, I think we're the ones who will be breaking them, honestly.

Henry Gilbert (3:15)

Oh, yes, yeah, I think so, at least in American news media.

Bob Mackey (3:18)

Yes, so yeah, that's just an up front to everybody as to why we do this podcast. And we love doing it. I think a big part of it is also reading your questions and comments because we don't exist in a vacuum. The things you say about our podcast help inform the podcast, and we really appreciate all of the comments you leave behind. And we like to answer lingering questions. We don't mind being corrected as long as people are polite.