Planet Mikey

Planet Mikey is loose, loud, and proudly unvarnished. It has the bones of a sports-and-comedy show, but the real format is conversation that keeps breaking its own rules. Mikey Adams is the central on-air presence, with Bill Smith frequently nearby as producer and corrector. The show likes a room full of voices. Vinnie Poplopupalo turns the intros into running jokes about unpaid labor, subscription pleas, and showbiz nonsense. Bob, Ben Kitchen, Willie Adams, Bill Lee, Jerry Thornton, and Bill Burt appear in the recent run as part of that rotating orbit. Baseball is the most reliable engine. Red Sox frustration gets treated with the seriousness of civic collapse, then immediately undercut by jokes, bad arithmetic, or a memory from another era. Old Boston sports figures matter here, especially when the show reaches back to Dick Raddatz, fantasy camp, local TV, and the kind of baseball stories that come with oversized personalities attached. Family material changes the temperature without making the show sentimental for long. Willie Adams getting older, working at Jersey Mike's, and dodging simple favorite-things questions becomes both a father-son check-in and a roast. The sponsor reads feel like part of the act. Pro Automotive, food drives, announcer bits, and complaints about getting paid all blur into the same comic machinery. Politics arrives with no soft landing. Massachusetts immigration numbers, Maura Healey, protests, and renamed sports teams become blunt rants rather than careful debate. The show can be crude, impatient, nostalgic, and surprisingly affectionate within the same few minutes. Its closings often collapse into song parodies, sea shanties, or altered classic-rock fragments before the routine request to rate, review, and subscribe. Nothing about it sounds engineered for neat clips. That is the point. Planet Mikey works for listeners who want the clutter left in: the interruptions, the half-corrections, the old grudges, the family ribbing, and the sense that the next topic could arrive from anywhere.