Lemonada to Launch New Podcast From Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, Renews ‘Wiser Than Me’

Podcasting network Lemonada is revealing its upcoming slate of shows, including a renewal of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me, and a new podcast from Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody.

Don’t Listen To Us, the new weekly show from Patinkin and Grody, launches Oct. 15 and will feature the married couple giving advice to listeners, with the help of their son, Gideon, in a similar vein to their viral Instagram videos. Wiser Than Me, which sees Dreyfus interview eminent older women, who have included Jane Fonda and Julie Andrews, and ask for advice on life and aging, will return for a fourth season.

Additionally, on Sept. 17, Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns will launch his podcast, Alive, which is meant to tackle the idea of “adulting” and “what it means to stay human in a complicated world.” And Lemonada will launch Since You Asked, a new podcast from psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb and happiness expert Gretchen Rubin, on Sept. 23, as well as a second season of Squeezed, hosted by Yvette Nicole Brown,

The new shows come as the independent podcast network is on track to grow another 50 percent this year based on downloads and views, with revenue tracking at a similar pace. The network will have a slate of close to 100 shows by the end of the year, centered around the company motto of “making life suck less,” which includes originals and partner shows.Fail Better with David Duchovny,andConfessions of a Female Founder with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex are also titles at the company.

Swedish podcasting company PodX took a majority stake in Lemonada this past summer. CEO Jessica Cordova Kramer said this has led to more strategic support, but the company is still run under the same leadership team, with the same structure and basic economics. Producers and engineers at the company just ratified their first three-year collective bargaining agreement.

Asked about the current podcasting landscape, which recently saw Amazon break up its podcasting studio Wondery, leading to layoffs and a reorganization around video, Cordova Kramer said she believes the podcasting industry is still “thriving” and gaining a larger percentage of ad budgets, but that it’s also evolving rapidly, which requires business to be nimble.

“I think we’re all just trying to figure it out. I think consumption of podcasts in whatever form, video, audio, etc, has just catapulted, and everyone’s trying to figure out how to make it make sense,” Cordova Kramer said. “Every six months, we’re slightly reinventing exactly what we’re doing.”

“I think it’s really heartbreaking when studios we know and love and respect deeply dissolve in some form or migrate in a way that makes them fundamentally different. I also think it’s a business, and content is hard to make, the economics change quite a bit over time, and the cycles are really rapid,” she added.

Lemonada has also leaned more into video in the past several months with shows like Fail Better with David Duchovny and The Sarah Silverman Podcast adding a video component and others being formulated as “video-first,” such as Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know. Video will also be a large part of Alive and Don’t Listen To Us.

Still, Kramer said the company is leaving room for audio-only podcasts, with one of their biggest shows, Wiser Than Me, going forward without a video component, for now, with the ultimate decision up to Louis-Dreyfus and how she wants to evolve the show. Part of this comes as she believes some segments of listenership are still consuming podcasts via audio, particularly when they’re on the move.

“I think if we said no to video, we would cut ourselves off from really cool content that is core to our mission and our business, and we want to reach people, and so we’ve got to be where they are,” Cordova Kramer said ”And then there’s still lots of us who are consuming audio-first products, and we’re not going to stop our commitment to that either.”