In a podcast landscape dominated by the manosphere, one of the biggest podcasts targeted to women sounds like it could be a children’s television show.
Giggly Squad is hosted by two best friends, fashion influencer Paige DeSorbo and comedian Hannah Berner, who first rose to fame via the Bravo reality show Summer House. In 2020, the pair began doing weekly Instagram Lives and eventually launched the podcast.
Since then, Giggly Squad has become one of the top-ranking shows on Apple Podcasts, with 44 million downloads last year. DeSorbo and Berner just wrapped up a sold-out national tour and are now releasing their first book How to Giggle: A Guide to Taking Life Less Seriously; promotion for the book recently included a guest appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
In several ways, Giggly Squad feels like an obvious daughter of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy. The show largely appeals to Gen Z white women. (Their fan base calls themselves the “Gigglers.”) It also has a similar conceit to the first iteration of Cooper’s pod: Two girlfriends having honest, sometimes frivolous, conversations about dating, sex, mental health, and other aspects of their lives.
It resembles a casual text chain between two best friends. In a recent episode, DeSorbo updated listeners about her UTI while Berner joked about an intense bout of PMS. “I like to let the Gigglers know where we are in our cycles,” Berner said.
Intimacy and kinship between hosts has become an expected feature of women-led podcasting nowadays, the best friend chat its own genre. It makes the audience, too, feel like one of the gang.
“It really just feels like you’re FaceTiming your best friends,” says Alexa Toback, a self-proclaimed Giggler. “You get a relationship that’s so close to them. It’s like a conversation you’re having with your friends every week.”
The affinity fans feel speaks not only to the increasingly parasocial role that podcasts have taken in our lives post-pandemic, but the way female friendship has become a commercial enterprise.
How podcasts became our new BFFs
Casual gabfests between women aren’t a new invention in the podcasting space. Some of the best examples have been organic endeavors by friends seeking a public outlet to discuss their personal lives and interests.
A popular product of the early podcast boom was the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, hosted by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow. The two long-distance friends would catch each other up on their lives, while having insightful and informative conversations about culture, politics, and gender. My Favorite Murder, hosted by comedians Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff, saw two pals bonding over their interest in true-crime stories. The BuzzFeed-then-Slate podcast Thirst Aid Kit saw hosts Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins verbally salivating over their latest celebrity crushes.
These older examples are a bit more produced and polished than the off-the-cuff, hyperpersonal vibe of Giggly Squad. However, podcasts like DeSorbo and Berner’s feel like a natural progression of this setup. This “group chat” phenomenon has proliferated the podcasting world recently, with shows like Lemme Say This, hosted by college best friends Hunter Harris and Peyton Dix, and The Ringer’s Jam Session, hosted by work pals Amanda Dobbins and Juliet Litman. The genre’s growth is particularly visible on social media. TikTok and Instagram Reels are rife with clips of two women sitting in a pink or beige studio and, in TikTok terms, having a yap about seemingly inconsequential matters.
Naturally, this chummy dynamic is also found in popular podcasts hosted by sisters, what you might consider a subgenre of the best friend pod. There’s the pop culture show The Toast, hosted by controversial sibling duo Jackie and Claudia Oshry, that has managed to become a mainstream hit. Olympic rugby player Ilona Maher’s newly launched podcast, House of Maher, featuring her sisters Adrianna and Olivia, is described as an audio version of their sibling group chat. It’s already performing well on the Apple Podcasts charts.
The hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This brought new attention to The World’s First Podcast, hosted by the show’s creator Erin Foster and her sister Sara. The Netflix show portrayed a fictional version of the podcast, with Kristen Bell standing in for Foster.
“Does this format feel more abundant in the culture?” says Vulture’s podcast critic Nicholas Quah. “The answer is yes, and that’s tied to the fact that podcasting has become normalized. It’s become part of everybody’s media diet.”
Quah adds that these loosely structured, largely unscripted podcasts are everywhere because they’re simple to make: “The economic structure of podcasting is to privilege shows like these that are very cheap, easy to record, and efficient.”
The barrier for entry is low — they don’t require journalistic skills or expertise on a certain subject. Instead, the prerequisite is friend chemistry and a sense of relatability. Over time, listeners gain knowledge of the hosts’ history with one another, interests, pet peeves, and other minutiae. By listening to Lemme Say This, for example, audiences get to know about Harris and Dix’s core college memories, past relationships, and parental quirks.
While “podcast bros” aim for self-improvement, podcast girlies are embracing gossip and mess
The parasocial effect that comes from watching women relate to each other may feel particularly familiar to fans of reality shows — another extremely character-driven format that gives audiences an unnatural amount of personal knowledge about people they’ve never met. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that podcasts like Giggly Squad have become a natural extension of branding for reality stars themselves. You can expect almost every Real Housewife nowadays, including notable duos, to launch their own podcasts based on their already-established personalities and friend dynamics.
These podcasts inevitably start to mimic reality TV, in providing both mindless entertainment and a deeply engaging connection to the talent.
By design, the hosts create their own share of extracurricular gossip for listeners to converse about. When Litman announced her pregnancy on Jam Session a few weeks ago, fans ran to the NYCInfluenerSnark subreddit to share their excitement and curiosity about the news and also mused about what the show would look like when she took maternity leave. When DeSorbo disclosed on Giggly Squad that she was having panic attacks, fans on Reddit immediately tried to investigate the cause.
Giggly Squad has the added benefit — and pressure — of the friends’ very public off-air personas; the show is a place where they can discuss the news moments created outside of the podcast too. When tabloids reported that DeSorbo had split from her partner of three years, Southern Charm star Craig Conover, last December, fans knew they could tune into Giggly Squad for the inside scoop. The same feedback loop occurred last month when Berner received backlash for comments she made during an interview with Megan Thee Stallion at the Vanity Fair Oscars party. Listeners anticipated the next episode, where Berner addressed the viral incident.
Quah says that “embracing a sense of mess and scandal” has become central to how younger women are building their brands through podcasts.
The way these shows embrace gossip and intimate conversation can easily be written off as a cheap tactic for attracting listeners. However, it’s not a coincidence that these podcasts have become, as Quah puts it, “sites of female empowerment,” forums for women to have the raw, unfiltered conversations where they feel heard and understood. It’s a notable distinction from the world of “podcast bros,” like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, speaking to wonky self-help experts and promoting an individualist lifestyle of self-improvement.
As shows like Giggly Squad continue to be made and their audiences continue to grow, these supposedly frivolous podcasts are occupying crucial space in women’s lives. They’re a stand-in friend, a subject to gossip about, and a much-needed space to feel understood.
