Pushkin.

What do poll dancing, AI Chappots and diet culture all have in common.

These subjects have a home on Embodied, the award-winning podcast I host from North Carolina

Public Radio W-U-N-C.

My name is Anita Rao, and you can consider me your personal guide to taking on the taboo.

Join me to explore important questions about our bodies and our society, where nothing is off limits.

So go ahead, listen to Embodied every Friday wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, Welcome to the show. This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fregoso and thank you for being here.

This week on the podcast we have screenwriter, critic, and podcaster himself, Andy Greenwald.

Despite creating an impressive body of work writing about music at

Spin magazine in the early 2000s, Andy came to prominence right around the time Grantland opened

its doors. The beloved Bill Simmons operated publication offered

Andy an outpost to write long-form pieces of criticism about contemporary television.

In the conversation you're about to hear, Greenwald admits almost at the top to being skeptical of this idea at first, which was pitched to him by childhood best friend Chris Ryan and Chuck Kosterman.

Andy loved television.

He wanted to write television though, not write about it.

But it wasn't long until Andy found himself taking to the position at ESPN's digital venture.

For more than two years, Greenwald wrote authoritatively on TV at a time when people were

more interested in reading about the latest HBO show than they were

about what's playing in a movie theater near them. Greenwald now finds himself

on the Mount Rushmore of TV critics alongside Emily Nussbaum, Mad Ziller sites, and Alan Sepinwall.

In fact, Andy was so good at picking apart serialized programs that showrunners began coming

to him about working on scripts.

...