Much like reality television, which stretches the limits of what could be called entertainment (high stakes glass blowing? Really?), there’s a podcast for every conceivable interest.

The popularity of the talk-radio adjacent medium started with This American Life and Serial, before branching out to include sex advice, comedy specials, history podcasts, storytelling over a range of genres… you get the idea.

Moving on to Call Her Daddy, a podcast started in 2018 when Sofia Franklyn, 27, and Alexandra Cooper, 26, joined forces to talk about their life in New York.

It’s like Sex and the City, but a podcast.

The CUT describes it as a “racy, weekly Barstool Sports podcast”, while the hosts themselves bill it as “uncensored, real, female locker room talk”. Barstool Sports is a sports and pop culture blog.

The popularity of the show comes down to the candidness of the conversation where sex, life, and adventures in the city take centre stage.

The show’s description on Apple Podcasts says that listeners can “Follow along with Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn as the duo dives into the explicit details of their life in NYC.”

It says the two “exploit the f*ck out of their crazy lives, making you feel a hell of a lot better about yours,” and that “whether you want to finesse the f*ckboy, upgrade your dating profile, or learn how to give a mean blow job/eat p**** like a pro, they’ve got you covered.”

In the two years since it launched, the show has garnered legions of fans, climbing the charts to land at number 20 on Apple Podcasts.

But the pair haven’t done a new episode since April 8, and according to reports this week, they are now feuding with both each other and with their higher-ups at Barstool.

…Cooper and Franklyn felt they had outgrown the Barstool Sports pond and wanted to find ways to expand their brands and income outside of the show, while the executives at Barstool felt that the hosts owed them for the platform and audience they had provided them early in their careers, and wanted them to honor the three-year contract they had signed.

Barstool isn’t engaging with the feud on the sidelines, either. David Portnoy, the founder of the platform, posted his own episode of the show in which he called the hosts “unprofessional, disloyal and greedy”.

Then negotiations started in an effort to retain the podcast on the Barstool platform.

Portnoy claims that Cooper was willing to take the deal he offered them, but that Franklyn wasn’t, and the disagreement has caused a rift between the two.

“I am willing to do Call Her Daddy. I really am,” Franklyn claimed. I just can’t do it under the circumstances that she wants,” she said, claiming that Cooper “is demanding that she controls the show.”

“We are partners,” Franklyn said of her and Cooper. “We have always been that way. We’ve always been 50/50, and so it’s put me in an extremely tough position. So here we are.”

Another raging feud has also fired up between the hosts and The New York Post regarding a 2018 article on the podcast.

In January 2020, the Cooper and Franklyn said on an episode of the podcast that their experience doing the Post interview was miserable, claiming that the makeup artist on set “was pretty much seconds away from a blackout” and that they didn’t like how the photographer made them take so many pictures next to urinals in a men’s bathroom.

The Post fired back with a scathing rejoinder titled “Spoiled podcast ‘fembots’ attack NY Post — for giving them publicity”.

[Post writer Kristen Flemming] calls the hosts the “non-dynamic duo,” “uptight frauds,” and says that the “lowbrow language” they use to describe their sex life, “makes Playboy letters look like Chekhov.”

Then there are the fans of the show, who are also feeling hard done by after finding out that Cooper and Franklyn were raking in massive salaries while joking constantly on the show about how broke they were.

Nobody is getting out of this alive.

For now, you can still listen to older episodes of the show online.

Here’s one on how to keep men interested during quarantine.

Enjoy, if you must:

[source:thecut]