In early February, Gimlet Media’s beloved internet-culture podcast Reply All began to air a four-episode miniseries called “The Test Kitchen,” to much anticipation. The series was going to examine one engrossing story that accompanied last summer’s national reckoning with racism: allegations of racial discrimination at food magazine Bon Appetit that led to the resignation of its longtime editor in chief. But on Reddit, where a group of superfans congregate to discuss the podcast, it was met with a bit of frustration. A few users noted that the show had stopped coming out on a weekly schedule and continued to stray from its original goal of covering the internet. Another common complaint: Reply All used to be so fun, and talking about race in the workplace isn’t.
Now that the series has prompted a widespread controversy at Gimlet and the resignation of two high-profile Reply All staffers, it seems the Redditors might have been right to worry the show had gotten itself in over its head.
At the same time, the subject made sense for Reply All. Though Bon Appetit, which is owned by Vanity Fair’s parent company Condé Nast, is a legacy print magazine, its YouTube channel became a bona fide phenomenon, beloved by people who might not ever follow a recipe. The channel’s featured chefs became internet celebrities in their own right, and the videos became more like a workplace comedy than actual fodder for the home kitchen.
As the hosts of Gimlet’s flagship show, Reply All hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman had, like the BA Test Kitchen chefs, become internet famous. Even though Reply All was more heavily reported and structured than your average chat-show podcast, the odd-couple dynamic between the two hosts was a central feature of the show. Vogt and Goldman shared details about their lives, from their struggles with mental health to Vogt’s hatred of scary movies. A recurring bit on the podcast, “Yes, Yes, No,” was about explaining viral tweets to the company’s CEO Alex Blumberg, but it often hinged on all three men revealing their own very specific habits of internet consumption.
The real Test Kitchen and “The Test Kitchen” series fell apart for different but related reasons. In the end, the podcast pointing out the mote in the eye of one toxic workplace had ignored the beam in its own. But the result for fans of both has been fairly similar, and not unlike witnessing a celebrity breakup. Twenty-one days after posting the first installment of “The Test Kitchen,” Goldman announced in a somber two-minute message on the Reply All feed that the final two episodes of the planned four-part series would not air, while the show would temporarily halt production. Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni—longtime producer and senior reporter of “The Test Kitchen” series, and a frequent Reply All character—were leaving the show for good. It was a surprising end to a partnership that had seemed so successful in public, but was clearly more contentious than listeners could have imagined.
When Gimlet began as a small startup founded by public radio alum Alex Blumberg and his cofounder Matt Lieber, Vogt and Goldman were among the company’s first hires. The early days of Gimlet were documented in the podcast StartUp, which informed listeners that Blumberg offered them equity in the company in the form of part “ownership” of the show, something reportedly not offered to later hosts. Reply All was a hit after its premiere, and soon the company launched an ever-expanding slate of shows, founded a wing that produced branded content, and shepherded some of its IP to television. In the years since the company was founded, it had morphed from a small staff with an opening slate of three podcasts to a behemoth with more than 100 employees producing 25 shows.
In the complaints from former employees that have followed “The Test Kitchen,” unequal compensation and hierarchical bullying are allegedly at the heart of the workplace’s problems. Eric Eddings, a former Gimlet employee known for co-hosting The Nod, a show about Black culture, claimed on Twitter that Vogt and Pinnamaneni “aggressively” opposed a union drive, with Pinnamaneni even going so far as to host an anti-union meeting. He also claimed that she and Vogt resorted to harassment, like calling him a “piece of shit” on Slack. Other former coworkers have come forward to second Eddings’s allegations of the company, discussing the barriers faced by people of color and calling the union fight “ugly.”
Part of the appeal of StartUp and Reply All came from their seeming commitment to honestly portraying its creators, warts and all. But these angry revelations from Gimlet staffers revealed the limits of that kind of public-facing honesty. With the help of a larger team, Vogt, Goldman, and Blumberg all built characters that weren’t necessarily reflective of what the environment in the company was like—but listeners were genuinely enamored by the fiction.
The messy implosion of Reply All has taken place on a variety of personal social media accounts and some limited public statements, making it something of a Rorschach test for fans reacting to the show’s sudden pause. “Extremely irritating to live in a time period where people are being canceled daily,” one person wrote in reply to Vogt’s resignation. “This whole thing is very sad and disappointing,” said another. Silence from the team, save for an elliptical expression of appreciation for Eddings from the show’s recently promoted third co-host Emmanuel Dzotsi, only increased the speculation.
But it also led to a reassessment of some of the moments in the company’s past where unpleasantness in the work environment was brushed off, or tension between Vogt and Goldman was played for laughs. One of the company’s earliest employees, Mystery Show creator Starlee Kine tweeted that she saw a bad dynamic develop early on in the company and her own acrimonious departure was related to it.