The New Skiffy and Fanty: Changes to Come on the Show

A little while ago, we ran a listener survey to learn more about how you access our show, what you listen to, what you like and dislike, and so on.  That survey garnered a lot of wonderful responses — thanks!  As such, The Skiffy and Fanty Show will be changing a bit.

These changes aren’t permanent.  They’re an experiment.  We’ll reassess in a few months to see how it’s working out, and we’ll ask you all for feedback again (because you’re awesome).

Here’s what you can expect around these parts for the foreseeable future:

1. Shorter Episodes

A number of listeners mentioned that they either preferred episodes no longer than 1 hour or didn’t much care for S&F episodes that ran longer than that time.  You may have noticed that our episodes have already started to drop in length.  Since we’ve never consistently recorded episodes under 1 hour, this is a bit of a learning process.  However, we plan to reduce the average length of all future episodes (minus Torture Cinema) to a 45-60 minute average.  Torture Cinema episodes will increasingly fall below the 2 hour mark until we can get it to as close to 1.5 hours as possible.

2. More Discussion; Fewer Interviews

The majority of respondents wanted more discussions, whether centered on our yearly theme, on general genre-stuff, or on genre-happenings.  As such, we’re going to put more focus on curated discussions than on interviews.  We’ll still run a few interviews here or there, but they will start to lean more towards the kinds of interviews we used to do way back when:  spoiler-y, in-depth monstrosities (with a little silly).  This will also get us away from a problem many listeners identified as “interviews as PR machine.”

3. Topic Suggestion Form

To make the show a little more interactive with you, the listener, we’ve decided it would be a great idea to take topic suggestions from you!  You can use this form to suggest a topic for any of our features.

3. Fewer Episodes

Last year, I (Shaun) recorded so much stuff that we’re still releasing material to this day (two more left!).  On top of that, we recorded an average of 6 episodes a month.  This format is going to change for one simple reason:  we’re doing too much and would be better off being a bit more focused.  As such, we’re going to reduce releases to an average of 4 episodes a month, with the occasional 5th episode (very occasional).  This will allow us to put more effort into what we’re already doing to improve the overall quality of the show.

4. No More Skits

Not enough people said they liked them, and so they are going the way of the dodo bird.  Shaun (me) weeps; Jen laughs maniacally as her evil plan comes to fruition.

We might make other changes, too.  The above changes are just the beginning.

What do you think?