Hello!
It’s been a while. Like eight months, to be precise, an absence for which we are very sorry. We have an update we’d like to share with you, if you have 20 minutes to spare, one last time:
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON THE WEB (or wherever you get your audio content)
I think this will not come exactly come as a surprise at this point, but we have made the decision to end Criticism Is Dead.
Why? you might ask. There are many reasons, several of which we get into in our final episode, but if you will join me in processing this decision through text—always and forever my medium of choice, at the end of the day—I will summarize some of them for you here with a degree of candor that I hope you will find refreshing or just plain interesting, not rude.
We initially meant to take a break—just a month or two for the summer! haha!—because Pelin had her film to shoot, and I had a combination of family matters / health matters / new job matters to deal with. But as what was supposed to be a temporary hiatus dragged out into three months, then four, it became clear that both of us were reluctant—afraid, almost—to be the first to raise the issue of our podcast, as if broaching the topic would either shatter the admittedly pleasurable respite or force us into an irreversible ultimatum, or both. Then we finally asked the question, and we met up, and we had every intention of restarting CID at a slightly more relaxed pace, but, again, weeks of inertia became another month, then two months, and finally, after much anguish, it was time to call it.
The podcast took a lot of work and a lot of time—especially on Pelin’s part, as our sole audio editor except for that time time I did SUCCESSION SENDOFF solo and was like “how does she do this every week.” While that was time well spent, there are many things we would like to do in life. Speaking for myself, I want to write more—novels! essays! blog posts for my soon-to-be revived Substack! maybe even a screenplay someday!—and I want to try new hobbies and travel and shoot my little photos and videos and live a full life. Pelin, I’m sure she will tell you, has so many films in her, and we will all be better for it when those become reality.
So the only way we could’ve continued to make this podcast work would be if it could take less time on our part. One route could’ve been hiring an hourly podcast producer to take the load of producing, editing, publishing, social media, and marketing off our plates—only then this podcast would’ve gone from a money-losing venture to an extremely money-losing venture. The other route could’ve been continuing at that slightly more relaxed pace I mentioned—say, an episode every other week, rather than weekly, and with scaled-down promotion efforts—but, in all likelihood, the podcast would not have grown at all, and even shedded listeners, and in six months or a year down the road, we probably would’ve found ourselves asking the same questions about the future of this podcast.
The ultimate solution, of course, would have been to get acquired by some deep-pocketed podcast company that would not only produce our podcast, but maybe even pay us a living wage to keep making it. But the days when an independent podcast like ours—with a small, if engaged, listenership, and two hosts who could not be considered celebrities or public figures by any stretch of the imagination—could get bought out by, like, Spotify (hi, we know some of you executives follow us) are gone.
So that’s it. We are saying goodbye.
We’re not going to say we will never return (especially if a deep-pocketed podcast company does decide to make us an offer), but for now, after approximately 116 episodes since the fall of 2020, Criticism Is Dead is dead. Thank you for everything.
Here’s where you can keep up with our goings-on:
Pelin: Twitter / Letterboxd / Instagram
Jenny: Twitter / Instagram / Substack / Letterboxd
If you need to get in touch, still: criticismisdead@gmail.com
Love you. Thank you. Farewell.
Signing off,
Jenny
omg! i’ve missed the podcast so much, but my heart is full thinking of each of your future endeavors. listening to CID has been such an enriching experience and it’s just so hard to come by small scale, well made entertainment oozing with taste. i loved having my media diet curated by you two. i thank everyone involved for their hard work! know you all will do great things and i’m excited to support!! ❤️