When Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein announced plans for an IFC sketch comedy show called Portlandia way back in 2010, the idea seemed slightly far-fetched. The two had already been baking online shorts as ThunderAnt for a few years, but Brownstein was still primarily a musician, even though Sleater-Kinney were on hiatus at the time. Also, could Portland culture and its endless '90s dream really support that much comedy? Well, it turned out, yeah. Portlandia lasted for eight seasons and 77 episodes. Now, Armisen and Brownstein are taking us back with a brand new Portlandia rewatch podcast.
The rewatch podcast is a growing cottage industry. At this point, it feels like many of our greatest TV actors are in permanent retrospective mode, talking about all the things that they did 15 or 20 years ago. The rewatch podcast boom has led to successes like The Lonely Island With Seth Meyers Podcast and Talking Sopranos, but I had no idea how many of these things there were before I saw this Wikipedia page. So Armisen and Brownstein might as well get in on it, right?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Armisen and Brownstein's new venture Podlandia: A-O Rewatch is produced by Will Ferrell's company Big Money Players, and it's set to launch next week, on July 16. They'll be doing this on YouTube, with audio feeds coming through in all the usual podcast distribution networks. It'll include appearances from Portlandia guest stars like Kyle MacLachlan and Aimee Mann, as well as director and co-creator Jonathan Krisel. In a statement, Brownstein has this to say:
Our hope with the Portlandia rewatch podcast is to continue the conversations we began when the show first aired. Conversations around community, how a place shapes and defines us, how much of life is mere performance, and how absurdity is often the best way to make sense of the world. Revisiting these episodes also reminded me of the ways Fred is singularly hilarious; we loved getting to hang out and reminisce, sing the praises of the cast, crew, and the city itself, and to have a new means of connecting with our audience.
Portlandia aired its final season in 2018, and Armisen and Brownstein have kept working together since then. Earlier this year, Brownstein, Armisen, and Brownstein's Sleater-Kinney bandmate Corin Tucker started playing shows with the Return Of Jackie And Judy, their Ramones tribute band. Tucker, meanwhile, just reunited her pre-Sleater-Kinney band Heavens To Betsy and announced a tour.
