Everything Geek Podcast: A Look Ahead to 2017

Hello everyone,

The curtain is closing on what has been another eventful year for our team at the Everything Geek Podcast. I have a lot that I want to talk about in this post but first I want to take the opportunity to thank all of you for your support. Regardless of whether you have been following us from the beginning or are a recent follower, your support means a lot to us and we greatly appreciate it.

During the week I sat down to think about what to talk about in this post and it only then hit me how much has happened for the podcast this year. We’ve now interviewed approximately 200 guests and, even though there were a couple of spells this year where we didn’t have any for a few weeks, we have continued to be consistent in getting guests and branching out into different themes with the guests. Getting to hear people’s stories is a big part of why I enjoy interviewing people and I wanted to take this chance to thank everyone who has been a guest on EGP. Some of the highlights this year were getting to interview Frank Grillo (Captain America), Lars Mikkelsen (Star Wars Rebels, Sherlock), Cory Michael Smith and Drew Powell (Gotham), Matt Letscher and Violett Beane (The Flash), Rick Gonzalez (Arrow), Nika Futterman (Star Wars: The Clone Wars), Haven Paschall (Pokémon) and Douglas Sloan and Art Edler Brown (Dragons), but it has been a pleasure talking to everyone who has taken the time to be interviewed on our show.

The major highlights for me on the podcast this year were getting to attend two conventions with a press pass and working with TV networks (namely Fox, Dreamworks and The CW) to bring you exciting interviews from Gotham, Dragons: Race to the Edge and Arrow respectively. Both of these opportunities were very exciting for their own reasons. I have been attending conventions since 2011 but it felt extra special attending MCM Ireland Comic Con (July) and Dublin Comic Con (August) this year with a press pass representing the podcast. Between Dublin Comic Con and London Film & Comic Con in July I was able to get 10 interviews with various guests, which was very exciting. Hopefully we will have more opportunities like that at conventions in 2017.

Likewise, hopefully we’ll be able to work with Fox, Dreamworks and The CW again in 2017. It was an honour to work with them this year and I really appreciate their willingness to work with us. We’re also hoping to work with more networks in 2017. I can’t confirm anything right now (nor do I want to jinx anything) but I’m hopeful we’ll be working with another network early in 2017 and possibly another one or two a few months later. Nothing is confirmed yet but if anything does get confirmed I’ll definitely be announcing it.

While this year has been very exciting for us it has also been a challenging one for me. There are personal reasons why it has been challenging (and I’m not going to go into all of them) but it started in late 2015. Long story short, after attending the midnight screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens I fell ill and could barely do anything for several days. This led to me falling behind on college work and after I went back for the second half of that course I had to prioritise it because of falling behind due to the illness. I don’t want to bore everyone here with details but this led to me not posting as often on the website and not updating frequently with news articles like I had in 2015. This has become a trend again since August when I picked up a worse illness. This illness has left me with a continuous sore throat and for the moment (who knows when it will stop) I’ve only been able to do short podcasts. I’ve kept up doing the interviews most of the time because they’re usually short (usually 20-40 minutes max) and don’t require me to talk the majority of the time as an interview is more about the person being interviewed, though sometimes the sore throat has acted up badly before an interview and I’ve had to reschedule. However, the illness has a side effect where it zaps my energy away so what seems like a simple task can become very challenging. This means that even before our website went down momentarily recently I was struggling to keep it updated.

I wanted to use this opportunity to apologise for not being as consistent with posting on the website. While we have become bigger between attending conventions as press and working with TV networks I was hoping our website would have become a lot bigger by now. Unfortunately because of me that hasn’t happened and I’m hoping in 2017 things will be very different. I don’t know when the illness will go away but for now I intend to have a fresh start on the website posts in 2017. My problem this year was that I kept trying to catch up on previous news articles but from now on I’m just going ahead with what’s new and not trying to catch up by days after today. I have put up a few today that I’ve had for a while but after today it’s a fresh start.

When my illness finally goes away I have big plans to provide a lot more content for the show. The illness has given me time to think about our show and I have decided on some changes going forward that I think will make our show better. From now on our main show on Saturdays will just be an interview (on the Saturdays we have guests) and the discussion of news topics from throughout the week. I want to turn the recent film releases and TV episode discussions into their own show as a more in-depth analysis that we can also put on YouTube as their own thing rather than have them be 10-20 minute snippets on our main show. This might be challenging for us to do at first as we would probably be doing these on weekdays instead of a Saturday (reserved for our main show obviously) but I think this would work out better for both us and you, the listeners. I wouldn’t just use these analysis shows for obvious popular film releases and TV shows but for material that has proven surprisingly popular on our YouTube channel (so including analysis shows for less mainstream shows like Dragons, Pokémon etc). As well as getting our staff involved I think these shows will also be a great way to get friends from other podcasts and other people I’ve become acquainted with involved as well.

In terms of other content we’re aiming to start doing videogame walkthroughs and getting our companion podcast Everything Geek Comic Cast underway in 2017. We’re also hoping to set up an iTunes account at some point and, of course, it wouldn’t be our podcast without interviews to look forward to. I don’t want to give away too much right now but I can say that we’ll be announcing our first guests from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them early in 2017. I’ve also started watching the latest Yu-Gi-Oh! series, Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, after having it recommended to me repeatedly (I’ve ended up loving it) and I can tell you that I’ve already booked several guests from it. You won’t have to wait long to find out who one of them is. I can also tease that we will have more of a focus on Marvel’s Netflix shows next year.

2017 will also mark a number of anniversaries we’re very excited about. The 40^th anniversary of Star Wars is the big one and we’ll be interviewing numerous guests from across all areas of Star Wars to celebrate the anniversary (including Original Trilogy, Prequel Trilogy, The Clone Wars, Rebels guests and more), not to mention Rogue One and The Force Awakens of course. 2017 will also mark ten years of The Big Bang Theory (and possibly its final season) so we’re hoping to get more guests from that show on our podcast. There are other anniversaries coming up as well but I don’t want to say too much of course.

Hopefully next year is an even bigger year for us than this year was. Thanks as always for your support and I look forward to providing a lot more content for you in 2017.

Ruari Williamson, Founder of the Everything Geek Podcast.

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