Podcast Boom/Bust sprinkled with manic energy of internet zeitgeist

Boom/Bust takes a tested formula in podcasting — stories of success and failure — and elevates it with a lot of flair.

Boom/Bust takes a tested formula in podcasting — stories of success and failure — and elevates it with a lot of flair and creativity.

The new series from The Ringer, hosted by journalist Alyssa Bereznak, dedicates its first season to HQ Trivia, a live game-show app that for a few weeks in 2017 became one of the hottest viral successes online.

There’s a lot of familiar ground here: business and creative leaders fighting for credit, the hubris of ambitious founders, engineers madly trying to keep an under-baked product from imploding as millions of users jump on board.

But that’s all sprinkled with the white-hot, manic energy of the internet zeitgeist. The allure for HQ’s booming audience at the time was the slightly reckless feeling of live television, that something could go wrong at any moment, combined with the very real prize money on offer.

Bereznak and her producers do an admirable job of capturing that moment with social media footage (there really is so much great archival material now sitting on smartphone camera rolls), and an expansive set of interviews.

The tone is cleverly balanced to keep things informative without feeling too self-serious, and the attention to detail in some complicated editing is impressive.

The team here also has done a clever job of focusing only on a few key characters in some early episodes that feature a vast cast of voices. We don’t learn everyone’s name, and we don’t need to.

The star of the podcast is Scott Rogowsky, the comedian who hosted HQ Trivia’s nightly broadcasts at its peak and became an object of fascination for millions online.

Bereznak draws out some clever threads from the experiences of Rogowsky and his former colleagues. We live in a time when success can be compressed into such a short window, and sudden fame is usually followed by harsh recrimination. The titular bust looms large over the coming episodes.

Listen to Boom/Bust on your favourite podcast app.

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