‘Emmys Watch 2025’ showcases critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama, Outstanding Comedy, and Outstanding Limited Series at that 77th Primetime Emmy Awards. Contributions to this theme explore critical understandings of some series nominated in these categories.

In this second part of the “Television that Changes Us” interview about We Disrupt This Broadcast, podcast creatives Sasha Stewart and Gabe González join one of the associate editors of Pop Junctions, Lauren Alexandra Sowa, to discuss how the podcast blends humor, expertise, and cultural critique. They share more about the process, the role of expert voices in deepening conversations, and the impact they hope to spark with listeners.

Lauren: Thank you so much for joining me, Sasha and Gabe. I was wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your role in the podcast—what each of you do, how you work together and collaborate, and how that all comes together.

Gabe: I will kick us off. My name is Gabe Gonzalez. I am the host of the Peabody's podcast, and I also contribute to some of the writing, although Sasha, who is joining us today, is really doing the heavy lifting on that front. Writing and editing is her bag, and I don't think the episodes would be as tight or as beautiful as they are without it. I'm very lucky to work with this team, especially folks like Sasha, because I get to do what I'd be doing anyway—watching television and talking about it. Only now, I don’t kidnap my boyfriend for an hour to talk about what I just watched on Andor (Disney+). I can do it on a podcast with some of my colleagues. It’s nice to be able to redirect that energy elsewhere.

we disrupt this broadcast podcast logo

Sasha: I couldn’t agree more. I’m Sasha Stewart. I am a writer on We Disrupt This Broadcast, and as part of my writing duties, I edit the interviews and transcripts. I love working with our team. We have a small but mighty group. Basically, what we do is come up with: what are these amazing Peabody Award-winning shows that we’re obsessed with? Which ones can we not stop talking about? That helps us pick our themes, and then we eventually write questions around those.

We also always start with an amazing research packet, so we try to create questions our interview subjects have never gotten before, ones others may have overlooked. One of the cool things about our show is that we’re all about: how does this show disrupt cultural narratives? How is this show changing the game and making the world a better place? A lot of cultural shows will stay away from that. But many writers, showrunners, creators, and actors are excited to talk about what drove them to create the show in the first place. We’re a really nice home for folks to talk about what they super care about when it comes to those shows.

Gabe: It’s also a very natural collaboration between the Peabodys and the Center for Media and Social Impact, because both organizations are focused on highlighting and elevating exceptional work. What’s fun about this podcast is we get to dive into what that means. You kind of know it when you see it—it’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. You know good TV when you see it, but if you’re not in that world, it’s hard to articulate what it is that makes TV exciting, fascinating, thought-provoking, or emotive. Getting to talk to showrunners, experts, actors, and journalists who’ve been covering some of these stories before they’re turned into scripts is such a fascinating process. Sasha and I are both television nerds. We got the writer of an Emmy nominated series with us here today with Sasha. And I am a stand-up comedian who once wrote on a now canceled late-night show, but we both have television experience.

Sasha: We’re both TV writers, end of sentence.

Gabe: That’s true, it’s true. We both love talking about this stuff. Being able to articulate what makes something disruptive is valuable these days—understanding the mechanisms that provoke conversation or thought. PRX (Public Radio Exchange) is the final missing piece of the puzzle, helping us put together such a professional-sounding production. Between all those forces, we’re really proud of the show we get to make and the guests we get to talk to.

Sasha: I think there are a lot of podcasts out there about how a show is made, but we’re the one about why a show is made.

Lauren: That’s excellent, absolutely. When I was listening to the podcast, something I was really impressed with was how seamless the collaboration is. You’re writing questions, Gabe is also a writer, so you’re taking that in, and it all moves together perfectly. I know you both come from politically engaged and media-savvy backgrounds, so do your personal experiences shape the direction of the podcast? Or do things ever surprise you in the moment during interviews—do you change direction after talking to guests?

Gabe: I actually used to work in journalism—that was my day job while I pursued comedy at night. I left journalism for comedy because comedy seemed like a more sustainable industry at the time, during the Facebook/Meta bubble of the 2010s, when everyone in journalism was hiring and then it exploded. I made the shift and doubled down on what I was passionate about.

Lauren: I understand that. Our readers will laugh, but I left acting for academia because it also felt more stable.

Gabe: Haha, right. And now all our creative industries are exploding. I feel like tech is chasing me at every career. It’s the boyfriend that won’t leave me alone, that I should have dumped long ago, but here it is.

Lauren: Well, now with AI, even that’s not stable, so who knows?

Gabe: Exactly. It drives me nuts.

Sasha: And I learned from our Fantasmas (HBO) episode that it’s also private equity and the financialization of culture that’s chasing us everywhere. Just saying, I learn so much from our own podcast.

Gabe: No, for real. We talked to Andrew DeWaard, who wrote a book about how Wall Street devours culture—Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture—and why it has turned its sights on television and creative fields. That episode really got me fired up, I know it got Sasha fired up, and the whole team fired up. We all come from these industries that merge journalism and the creative, we got experience in both. So, it makes me doubly passionate. I want to get to the why, and I want everybody to be just as mad about it. In some ways, comedy or criticism is an easy way to get folks on board with an idea, rather than yelling at them in an article on the very website that is the problem. Nobody’s looking at articles on Facebook or X anymore.

Lauren: So true. Do you think there’s a balance between humor, critique, and deep analysis? Because as a comedian, and with the podcast not just being heavy—it’s celebratory but also critical—how do you strike that balance for listeners?

Sasha: It’s been a fascinating journey. We all come from comedy backgrounds and are obsessed with comedy. Originally, we had grand plans: we were going to infuse so much humor in the podcast and it’s going to be so funny. We are going to have all these very specific segments. But what we found, and one of the beauties of being in a different medium than we had worked in before, is that you figure out what actually works for the medium. And for podcasts, that hyper-scripted segments are not funny. They just don’t work well. What works better is having a fabulous host and interviewer like Gabe, who brings humor organically. We just trust that it’s going to be funny— we know Gabe is going to bring the humor, he is going to bring the joy, and he is going to connect with the subject in a way that subject isn’t going to suspect, and they are going to bond over something delightful and hilarious. We always end up with these funny moments we put at the end of the episode as our “most disruptive moment.” They’re always unexpected and improvised, which makes them unique. Which, again, we both come from scripted comedy and improv backgrounds, so it makes sense that humor shows up more naturally in conversation. Therefore, when we’re writing questions, we can put on our “nerd hat” and ask the most sincere, intense questions of all time, because we can trust that Gabe will bring the humor and the levity.

Lauren: You have to make them laugh so you can make them cry, right?

Sasha: Absolutely, and we also start interviews with a softer question to warm-up our interview subjects. Not start with “what is this most traumatic experience like?”

julio torres—creator and star, fantasmas (we disrupt this broadcast (season 2)

Gabe: And some folks we are interviewing are already primed to talk about these dark topics in comedic ways, since they are dealing in satire. Fantasmas is a great example—critiquing the isolationism caused by late capitalism through weird vignettes. Severance (Apple TV) was another great example of that, where we got to talk to Ben Stiller, the cast, and production. It’s refreshing to see so many shows embrace satire to critique the world around us. Comedy can be a powerful tool to lay the world bare as it is without being totally depressing, but isn’t afraid to speak the truth, right? That conversational tone is where we can find the happy balance as Sasha had said. As a team, as writers and hosts, we’ve melded together into a Monstro Elisasue voice. I don’t feel like the podcast is just my voice—sometimes he’ll read one of Sasha’s questions and say, “Wow, I was trying to ask that, but it took me three sentences and inarticulate words, and Sasha said it in a sentence and a half. So, love that question!” We mold ourselves to fit each other because we bring different strengths to the table. But the podcast has evolved to meet the moment. We ask: what do our listeners need? What’s the world around us saying? How can we be reflective of that, rather than imposing a rigid structure on our interview series?

Sasha: And the other thing that I think is so great and special about our podcast is that we also give ourselves the opportunity to talk to experts. So, we know that if we want to have a lighter interview with our main subject, we can then pivot into the more hardcore, gritty stuff with our interview guests. In that Fantasmas episode, Gabe and Julio had an amazing conversation that was super funny, very emotional, and in-depth. But then when we talked to Andrew DeWaard, it was like, okay, now let’s get into: what does financialization of culture mean, what are the six aspects of financialization, and what exactly is private equity? And I’m finally going to understand that for the first time in my life.

Gabe:  And I will say, just to get brutally honest here for a second, there was a moment during that interview with Andrew DeWaard where he called out the specific CEO of a company as an example of something he’s talking about in his book. In conversations with production, we review notes for everything, and our producer flagged it: is it okay that we say this? I would say that in 8 out of 10 places I’ve worked, whether TV or publications, folks clutch their pearls at a guest calling out a CEO of a powerful company that directly and citing them as the problem and cause of all these symptoms we are outlining. I remember we talked to Jeff about it, and Jeff was like, “Well, that’s the guest’s opinion, so I don’t see why we should censor them.” And that was that.

It feels so liberating to work on a team that isn’t caught up in corporate webs of having to answer to people. It was just like, “hey, we brought on this guest, they’re the best person to talk about this, let’s talk about it honestly.” And if that means pointing a finger to better illustrate their point, then let’s do it. I really appreciate that. It’s less censorship than I’ve faced at major networks that claim to speak truth to power. It’s refreshing, and it feels liberating as a comedian, too, to be able to say, yes, let’s laugh at the guy that canceled the Acme movie that’s coming back anyway because people wanted to see it. I want to do that.

Lauren: That’s awesome to hear that you don’t have to worry about the PR of it all, the studio heads, or the gatekeepers that writers are always trying to get through. You have this space to just be honest and let the guests be honest, and that’s awesome that Jeff was on board with that as well. Do you have any thoughts on how listeners should engage with the podcast beyond just consuming it? Are there other actions or conversations you hope it sparks?

Sasha: What I hope our listeners take away is, first, to think about the culture they consume more critically. To consider what it’s saying, how it makes them think, how it makes them feel. I hope they then talk to their friends and family about it.

We’ve had so many great episodes this year, but I cannot stop talking to my friends about the Fantasmas episode. If I’m that engaged, I’m hopeful our listeners are too. When we talked to Tony Gilroy about Andor Season 2, about fascism and authoritarianism and how leaders are born in crises, I hope listeners took something away about how to act in our current climate. Or in our Bad Sisters (Apple TV) episode, we had an incredible expert talking about divorce, and it made me think about divorce in a way I never had before. I hope listeners, too, thought, “Wow, I’m empowered to see this differently,” or “I never realized I was feeding into cultural bias against divorced women, and the pressure for women to stay in marriages that are bad for them.” So, I hope the podcast is engaging on multiple levels, and that it helps people have difficult, but also fun, conversations with their friends and family.

Gabe: I want to echo something Sasha said earlier about the importance of the experts. One of the greatest takeaways from any episode is their perspectives—their insights into the themes we’re talking about. We had this incredible episodeabout Pachinko (Apple TV). We interviewed the showrunner, but we also spoke with comedian Youngmi Mayer about her Korean heritage and her memoir. I hope people who listen to that episode and watched Pachinko also walk away wanting to read her book or hear her stand-up. She is an incredible comedian. Her themes dovetailed perfectly with the show, offering a modern, irreverent take on a similar story. I like to think we always bring complementary materials or suggested additional reading for people who want to go deeper. If you’re a nerd like us, you can learn more or discover a new historical fact or genre you hadn’t considered before. I hope these experts can expand that universe for you.

Sasha: To that end, we did an episode with Amber Seeley of Out of My Mind, a Disney+ movie about a young woman with cerebral palsy. It’s about accessibility and disability representation, and it’s incredible. The interview was fascinating because she talked about how much better her set was when she made it fully accessible. It wasn’t just for disabled folks on set—it made everyone’s lives better. I hope it sparks people to think, “If I’m an architect, why don’t I design with accessibility in mind? Not just because I have to do it because of ADA, but because it makes everyone’s lives better.” Similarly, our expert in that episode also talked about barriers to accessible and integrated education. It totally blew my mind, and I hope it makes parents listening think differently: is my school accessible? Are my kids getting the education they deserve? Or, if they’re facing those educational barriers, they’ll realize they’re not alone—there are activists everywhere fighting for change.

Lauren: I think one of the things that I love hearing you guys talk about here and on the podcast is this perfect combination of the academic side of things—that a lot of us in media studies are writing about in the journals—and TV creators and writers are creating for television, and you're melding them together, and then bringing it to the public. And the podcast medium allows them to listen to it while they're doing other things; they don’t need to sit and read through the dense research. Yet it can still spark these conversations that we’re all trying to have in different ways. So, I'm so glad that this podcast exists. It’s been fun to listen to!

To wrap up, congratulations again, Sasha, for being a writer on the Emmy nominated Dying for Sex (Hulu). I would love if you could share more of your thoughts on this experience.

dying for sex – Emmy nominee, outstanding limited series nominee

Sasha: Working on Dying for Sex was the career highlight of my life. I had cancer several years ago, I have a number of health issues, and so getting to work on a show that was similar to what we get to talk about on We Disrupt This Broadcast…it was a show that was not afraid to take on these big subjects in a way that is funny, that in our show is very sexy; it was truly the joy of my life.

One of my favorite things that happened with the show, just on a personal level was that I made my therapist cry—because when she watched the series, she said, “I can’t believe how much of our journey that we have been on together that you put on screen.” That’s one of the beautiful things of working on a narrative show: you get to take the difficult, personal experiences and show them authentically through characters who grow and change. And one of the blessings of therapy is you get to grow and change. You get to grow alongside your characters and heal alongside your characters.

An aspect of the show was about how women in particular are often perceived in the healthcare space, are often dismissed in the healthcare space. I think that is something that has happened to me over the course of the last 15 years of my life. It was a huge growth for me being able to express that through a character, and hopefully helps a lot of women who are currently going through the healthcare system advocate for themselves and learn how to talk to their doctors and trust themselves in these really difficult situations. It is really inspiring to me to be able to create characters to model how to do it right. The Sonya character is somebody who I really hope exists a lot more of in the world, because there are so many people who I met in the healthcare system who are trying to make it better—trying to be Sonyas. My oncologist in particular is somebody who was really very wonderful, and a true partner in my experience. So, to show—here's the reality, here’s how it often is—but it doesn't have to be that way. I think that’s one of the beautiful things about narrative TV and trying to disrupt these narratives. You can both authenticate people’s feelings, validate people’s feelings, like, yes, this is the horrible problems we're seeing, and then also model a better future.

Lauren: Incredible. I want to thank you again so much for being here and talking with me today. You both have such insight and wonderful enthusiasm, and I am excited for our readers to engage with your work and the podcast!

Biographies

Gabe González is a Puerto Rican comedian, writer and actor living in Brooklyn, NY. He can be seen in Season 4 of The Last OG, the HBO Latino documentary Habla y Vota, and starred in Audible’s The Comedians. His pilot ‘Los Blancos’ was a winner at the Yes And Laughter Lab in 2019 and his satirical sketch “Bootlickers” was an official selection at the LA Comedy Film Festival and Atlanta Comedy Festival in 2022. He’s hosted and produced digital videos for places like MTV, GLAAD and Remezcla, and performed stand-up across the country. His most recent projects include a monthly queer comedy show in NYC called ‘The Lavender Scare’ and working with Imagine Entertainment to pen the short film Alma, available on Amazon.

Sasha Stewart is a Writers Guild Award-nominated TV writer, producer, and creator who creates work that elicits joy, has a positive impact, and gives her an excuse to eat craft services. She most recently staffed on the critically-acclaimed, 9x Emmy-nominated limited-series dramedy Dying for Sex (FX), starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, available to watch now on Hulu (U.S.) and Disney+ (Worldwide). Her TV credits include: Amend: The Fight For America (Netflix), The Fix (Netflix), and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (Comedy Central). She also writes for the Peabody Awards podcast, We Disrupt This Broadcast. Sasha is a winner of the 2024 NRDC Climate Storytelling Fellowship for her and co-creator Casey Rand’s half-hour comedy pilot, Bill on Earth. A PSA starring Jane Fonda she co-wrote aired on CBS Sunday Morning in November 2024. She participated in the 2020 Comedy Think Tank on Paid Family Leave, the 2023 Stand Up For Humans comedy show, and is a winner of the 2020 Yes and… Laughter Lab. She is now part of the Laughter Lab’s Leadership Committee. She contributes to the New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Cosmopolitan. She developed a women’s healthcare docuseries with Samantha Bee and Soledad O’Brien. She’s currently developing an animated half-hour comedy, a lighthearted legal procedural, and has she mentioned you look absolutely radiant today?

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and has a BFA in Acting from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture and has been published in The International Journal of Communication and Communication, Culture and Critique. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud "Disney Adult" and enthusiast of many fandoms. Lauren is also a Pop Junctions associate editor.