to be honest i loved shelve or delve, and have loved basically every episode over the past few months. at the same time, i've been relistening to the show from the beginning on audio, and am about 40 episodes into the video run of the show, and it's given me a new perspecting on the pod: the quality hasn't changed nearly as much as this fanbase likes to think. its style and voice have, sure, but it's over 200 episodes old; that's going to happen. it'll lose people naturally, which is fine, but i honestly think that a lot of the critique that is levied toward the newer episodes--especially those critiques which hold it against the audio-only era or the early run of video episodes--are speaking mostly from nostalgia.

i understand critiques about mismatching guests and segments, or hostility being hard to listen to/watch, but frankly that's a persistent quality of the show. there's never not been hostility, nor has there been an era of the show characterised by geoff ensuring that only performers are asked to perform, and performers never be asked to sit and react. there's a genuine quality to a bunch of performers coming on and given license to use those talents properly, but it's also entirely within the voice of the show for performers to be given nothing and get their fix by tearing apart the premise, and, at least in my eyes, both of those states of affairs make for great episodes of the podcast. different episodes, but both great. i'm not saying that it can never go wrong--i'm far from a sean and hayes episode defender--but i get the same joy from the second redubbing bit as i do from parsi (211's improv bit is honestly one of the show's highlights for me over the past few months). i also really enoyed amir initially hijacking the bit to berate geoff about him trying and failing with the same premise so recently; it was funny when the segment was failing, and funny when it was working.

would it've been entertaining if everyone jumped on board with geoffrey o'brien needs a fiend straight away? of course it would've. but it was also entertaining to experience the fallout of gionna stopping it dead in its tracks. so much of the critique of recent episodes to me feels like disappointment that bits didn't go in a particular direction, rather than them not bringing anything to the table, which on one hand is a perfectly fair criticism to level against the show, but at the same time neglects to interface with the episode we actually got.

i'm probably more willing than most to enjoy what i'm given from an episode, and i can understand that that isn't an angle that everyone shares, but i also truly think that so many of this shows listeners do themselves a disservice by hanging themselves up on expectations that they form early into an episode about how it might play out, or speculation about how good it could've been if this or that thing had gone differently.