Sup Doc: A Documentary Podcast · Sup Doc

OUR TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY SHOW

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

George and Paco frame ten years of Sub Doc against jobs, layoffs, and the show’s 200th episode milestone.

Ten years gets loose fast. Paco and George open by trying to remember whether the theme song comes first, then fall back into the old SubDoc intro like they pulled it from a drawer. The website still works, which somehow becomes an event of its own, since the last year-end review listed with both of them was at the end of 2022. The memories are not exactly crisp. They scroll past titles like Low Country, Moonage Daydream, Pelosi in the House, Stutz, and Light and Magic with the confidence of people who watched some of it and forgot the rest. That is the mood. The anniversary is less polished retrospective than two friends checking whether the old machine still turns on. The best tangent has bite. A documentary about RISD students building an apartment inside empty mall space gives them the kind of oddly specific story they clearly enjoy. It sounds made up at first. Someone lays out the setup: art-school kids move behind the developed mall walls, bring things upstairs, wall off the space, and eventually get a key and lock. Then the details make it funnier and stranger. They haul furniture, cinder blocks, and cameras through tight routes, turning a goofy anecdote into something with real footage and a lot of strange labor behind it. The comparison gets checked. Someone brings up Dark Days, then backs off because this is not survival housing. It is more like a long-running art-school intrusion with mall bathrooms and no shower. The privilege point matters. The film apparently says the obvious part out loud: if Black or brown people had been setting off alarms in a mall, they likely would have been caught much sooner. Nobody sands that down. It sits there as a blunt correction inside a story that is otherwise funny, crafty, and a little absurd. The ending wanders again. Dates, Kansas City, Tulsa, Oklahoma connections, and Will Scoville slide in until the conversation feels less like an anniversary special and more like the afterparty for a booking call. Then comes the bleak joke. By the time they reach twenty years, they picture a nightmare political future, shake it off, and close with the same dry looseness they started with.

As heard by us

A loose reunion turns the RISD mall-apartment story into a sharper look at class and privilege.

Paco and George settle back into the easy banter that makes SubDoc feel familiar, and the reunion gives the episode its best rhythm. They move into the RISD mall-apartment story, where the appeal is in the odd, concrete details: art-school students hauling furniture behind mall…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a reunion chat that slips into a strange documentary digression, then lands on a sharper point.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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