Amy Poehler wants her true-crime podcast to make you laugh

It was a Friday morning in December, and Amy Poehler was talking about murder. More specifically, she was directing a pair of comic actors over Zoom as they talked about murder in their guise as hosts of a fictional true-crime podcast titled – yes – “Women Talkin’ ’Bout Murder.” Today’s victim: Mary Benson, who went on a yoga retreat and plunged to an untimely demise at the bottom of a ravine.

“Namaste, a Sanskrit greeting that literally means ‘I bow to you’ – and, coincidentally, the last words Mary Benson spoke before she took her final bow on this earth,’” one of the actors, Emily Spivey, ad-libbed in a conspiratorial manner. “Namaste indeed.”

Having been given the story outline – dead lady, picturesque location, potentially murderous yogis – Spivey and her co-host, Liz Cackowski, were improvising the rest, with Poehler offering improv-friendly “yes, and”-style suggestions, punctuated by wild spurts of laughter.

The three women have a long history, dating back to their days on “Saturday Night Live” – Poehler was a cast member, Spivey and Cackowski writers – in the early 2000s. Their many collaborations include the 2019 movie “Wine Country,” written by Spivey and Cackowski and directed by Poehler, in which they and yet more of their comedy friends – Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell and Maya Rudolph among them – play a group of women on an alcohol-fueled 50th-birthday excursion to Napa.

In character as Donna and Jobeth, the “Murder” podcast hosts, Cackowski and Spivey riffed about their negative attitudes toward yoga. “So good, so good,” Poehler interjected. “Liz, do you want to get us into this corpse-pose thing and talk about how there’s something creepy about yoga, anyway?”

“Women Talkin’ ’Bout Murder,” a 10-part series whose first episode will be released May 9, is the third satirical podcast produced by Poehler’s production company, Paper Kite, in partnership with Audacy Podcasts. (A fourth podcast, “Million Dollar Advice,” which premiered in March, provides nonsatirical advice on workplace dilemmas.) The first title in the collaboration, “Say More With Dr? Sheila,” featuring Poehler as an aggressively incompetent couples therapist, had its debut last fall. (It reached No. 1 on the Apple Podcast comedy chart and No. 4 overall.) The second, “The Chris Chatman Do-Over,” which stars comedian Ike Barinholtz as a hot-take-spouting Joe Rogan-esque shock jock, wrapped up last month.

Conceived last year during the Hollywood writers’ strike, when the no-writing rules were waived for podcasts, “Women Talkin’ ’Bout Murder” was inspired by Poehler’s and Cackowski’s addiction to podcasts – the cheesy as well as the good.

“I personally am very grateful for how podcasts can make people feel less alone and more connected,” Poehler said during a Zoom interview from her office at Paper Kite in Culver City, California. Behind her loomed a large object that looked like some sort of commemorative platter but was in fact the seal of Pawnee, Indiana, the fictional city from her sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

“That’s the serious version of things,” Poehler continued. “Then there’s the comedic version, which comes from loving something and wanting to do a parody take on it.”

These days, it’s hard to find a celebrity who doesn’t have a podcast featuring other celebrities. On “Armchair Expert,” Dax Shepard shoots the breeze with guests like David Sedaris and Connie Britton. On “Unqualified,” Anna Faris gives relationship advice to, among others, Christina Ricci, Kevin Bacon and David Duchovny. And on “Street You Grew Up On,” people like Eva Longoria, Jimmy Kimmel and Issa Rae chat with Kerry Washington about their childhoods.

Poehler’s podcasts also feature a constellation of stars, mostly old friends she knows from her early improv days in Chicago and New York, and from “Saturday Night Live.” Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Will Forte and Fred Armisen (playing a rather funny artificial intelligence bot) all make appearances in various guises – as fictional characters rather than themselves.

Cackowski compared their approach to that of Armisen, Seth Myers and Bill Hader in “Documentary Now,” the series on Netflix that parodies that genre. “What if we made ‘Documentary Now’ a podcast?” she said. “The whole project has been about which of our friends come hang out and improvise.”

The podcasts include Poehler’s satirical sendups of ads from the sponsors, including ZipRecruiter, eharmony and Kroger, and they stand out in a crowded market, said Jenna Weiss-Berman, executive vice president of Audacy Podcasts. After a period of almost unfettered growth, the industry has endured painful retrenchments in the past year and a half or so, and finding something new and fresh is increasingly difficult, she said.

“This isn’t just celebrities chatting with other celebrities,” Weiss-Berman said. “This is Amy Poehler doing her thing, which is being the master of improv.” While fictional podcasts can sound overly theatrical and dramatic, Weiss-Berman said, Poehler’s titles are “fast and fun.”

Case in point: “Say More,” both an homage to, and a takedown of, the popular genre in which therapists broadcast their sessions with patients. (The title comes from a phrase beloved of celebrity therapist Esther Perel, who herself appears briefly on one of the episodes, endorsing Dr? Sheila.)

“It’s so interesting, from a voyeuristic point of view,” Poehler said. “But then you’re like, ‘But what kind of person would go on? And also, what kind of therapist, honestly, would do this in public?’”

Dr? Sheila – who is not a real doctor and who insists for legal reasons that her patients utter the title “doctor” with a question mark in their voices – is fully committed to her ill-conceived therapeutic techniques, like inviting an outrageously intrusive mother-in-law to hide under a pile of blankets in the consulting room as her son and daughter-in-law discuss her lack of boundaries.

“I get to give advice that’s ridiculous,” Poehler said cheerfully. “Say More” reached its zenith (or maybe its nadir) in an episode called “Analysis Paralysis.” Poehler’s Dr? Sheila becomes so frazzled after a session with two married therapists who can’t articulate their problem that she calls her own therapist, Dr. Shelly Cavalier (Dratch), for support. “I’m frustrated that I’m so frustrated,” she says.

Triggered by Dr? Sheila’s ineptitude, Dr. Cavalier calls her therapist, Trish (Fey), who in turn has to call her own therapist – one of the patients in Dr? Sheila’s original session – to complain about Dr. Cavalier. “I try to set up boundaries with her, and she pushes them and pushes them,” Trish sobs.

Poehler described how it works.

“We had an episode where a couple wanted to open up their marriage,” she said. “So we said, ‘OK, here’s the game’ – because in improv, you have a game that you’re playing. The game is, he wants to open up the marriage; she’s reluctant. And then we think, what would be funny is if she ends up doing really well, and he’s thinking he made a mistake. The end. That’s all we do. And so what’s so fun is, the improvisers who join us, they get to decide how they feel about everything and where it will go.”

“The Chris Chatman Do-Over” makes fun of the trope of the “ex-comedian mouthpiece guy who has a lot to say and a lot to learn,” Poehler said. Barinholtz plays Chatman, whose previous show, “The Chris Chatman Confrontation,” was canceled after it became prohibitively offensive. Ordered to tone it down and attract female listeners as a condition of his return to the airwaves, Chatman continually makes offensive remarks in the guise of anti-wokeness. Each episode begins with an apology for something he said in the previous one.

As for “Women Talkin’ ’Bout Murder,” it comes from Poehler’s love of driving to work while listening to true-crime podcasts. (Among her favorites are the long-running series “Criminal” and the true-crime comedy cult hit “My Favorite Murder,” featuring long discursive meanderings by the hosts.)

That so many people relish in something so grisly and unpleasant, Poehler said, is one of the things she finds funny about true crime.

“It’s a genre that has so many very serious takes, but it’s so ripe for comedy, because why are we driving to work at 8 o’clock in the morning listening to people get dismembered? Why are all these women talking about these horrible things, and why are we all listening to it?”

One thing about the podcast ecosystem: Hosts are always appearing as guests on one another’s titles, in an endless Möbius strip of interviewers and interviewees. And so all the protagonists in the Poehler universe – Dr? Sheila, the true-crime hosts, and Chris Chatman – pop in and out of one another’s shows. For instance, a couple who sought help from Dr? Sheila will reemerge on a later “Women Talkin’” episode delving into the mysterious death of the woman’s first husband on a cruise ship.

Poehler said that listening to podcasts helped her get through the difficult years of COVID and that making them had buoyed her during the writers’ strike. Asked how she maintains her sanity during an unfunny moment in time, she replied, “Good laughs and good friends – that’s the recipe for getting through the toughest times.”

She then successfully deflected the question by channeling Dr.? Sheila, spouting a bunch of authoritative-sounding word salad.

“Sarah, I find it very interesting that you said I come across as happy,” she said. “One thing I’ve learned is that everybody is a lot of things most of the time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.