Popping Off

“Olivia Rodrigo is one of the premier swearers in contemporary popular culture” might not be the type of analysis expected from top poli-sci profs, but it’s the flavor that ­UConn’s Stephen Dyson and Jeffrey Dudas are dishing out regularly with their deep-dive podcast, “The Pop Culture Professors.”

Perhaps more expected, their thought-provoking discussions also tease out political or philosophical themes in everything from “Sinners” to “Interstellar,” “Star Wars: Andor” to “The Last of Us,” and Taylor Swift to last year’s Oasis reunion tour.

Since their August 2022 debut episode, “The Weird Politics of ‘Star Wars,’” Dyson and Dudas have attracted 2,500-plus YouTube subscribers, plus thousands of listeners on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The show’s top four most-viewed YouTube episodes all discuss “Andor,” with the most popular at 25,000 views. Why? Dyson and Dudas note that not only was the show itself about a political revolution (plus a ratings smash), but the professors intentionally released their analyses the day after new installments dropped on Disney+.

The quick turnaround of the medium allows them to participate in up-to-the-minute conversations on pop culture happenings, a stark contrast to the cadence of peer-reviewed publications or their forthcoming book analyzing pop culture, inspired by the podcast’s success.

“You work on an article for a year or more, then another six months to a year to get feedback from a journal, then longer than that before it hopefully starts to find purchase among the public,” says Dyson, who is director of graduate studies for UConn’s poli-sci department. “But with videos that reach at least a certain number of views, you tend to get a certain amount of comments. Some thoughtfully disagreeing with you! But most of these people aren’t in academia. That’s not something you find much with academic writing.”

The professors bring not only differing subspecialties to the table but also, Dudas notes, differing tastes.

“Stephen maintains a notion of higher and lower levels of culture, that we should focus on ‘prestige’ storytelling, while I’m of the mind that all culture has something to offer, even the kinds of movies TBS or TNT airs on Saturday mornings,” Dudas explains, citing their episode on reality television. “Even stuff that doesn’t tend to be self-consciously ‘important’ nevertheless contributes something meaningful to a broader conversation, what society is saying about who they are and what they believe.”

New audience members can dive into the podcast by finding an episode on a favorite movie, album, or show — or, if looking for just one installment, Dyson and Dudas cite as a personal favorite their compare-and-contrast of 1986’s “Top Gun” and 2022’s sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”

“Jeff had gone in thinking the original was this awful pro-war propaganda piece, but I convinced him [during the episode] that it was this anti-war and anti-institution piece, about a young man getting bullied by ‘the state,’” Dyson explains.

“Those two movies, particularly the first one, are seen as about as mainstream pop culture as you can get, not saying anything of particular subtlety,” Dudas elaborates. “That episode was when I started to realize what we could do with broader perspectives on these texts.”