On this week’s episode, Elizabeth and Erin talk to the anonymous creator of the viral Instagram and Twitter accounts, Christian Nightmares. (We’ll call him “Christian.”) Christian is using the account, an archive of American evangelical messaging, videos, photos, and music going back decades, to examine pop culture dedicated to a vengeful Heavenly Father, one which loomed over his upbringing in an evangelical Baptist church, and which left him terrified and ashamed as early as 5. Erin was also raised in the evangelical church and she Christian compare notes about their experiences as well as their decisions to leave the church and the rehabilitation that followed. Listen as we try to parse why Erin was told that Christian women shouldn't wear pants, while our guest was told that Christian men should never wear shorts. We also hear from new dad Christian about how he's redefining the role of Father, and bringing it down to earth.

When journalist Maggie Serota isn’t asking Glenn Danzig the tough questions and making Hollywood flacks squirm, she’s sharing screenshots of text conversations with her father about his several dogs on her must-follow Twitter account. Maggie’s dad, as she tells Matt and Elizabeth in this episode of “Daddy Issues,” uses his flip phone to send her blurry images of his Rottweilers and to check in on her well-being after seeing news about a violent crime that happened months prior and is nowhere near where she actually lives. You know, dad stuff! Maggie also talks to us about her fascination with a captivating image of a shirtless Sting, and plays a high-stakes Sting trivia game Elizabeth wrote for her. Then it’s on to a Thanksgiving-themed round of "Daddy Issues!," in which we discuss the fresh hell that is Penn Station during holiday travel, the Turkey crisis hotline, buffets in the greater Philadelphia area, and Matt shares shocking information about his relationship with cranberry sauce.

Erin & Elizabeth solve the mystery of the final episode of the show, "Made in America," widely considered to be the greatest tv finale of all time. We talk to the critics and authors of The Sopranos Sessions, Matt Zoller Seitz (New York Magazine) and Alan Sepinwall (Rolling Stone), about the meaning of the ending, the evils of parallel parking, the importance of ambiguity in art, what makes David Chase tick, and the living legacy of the late actor James Gandolfini - his son Michael Gandolfini, who plays Tony Soprano as a young man in The Many Saints of Newark, 7 years after his father’s sudden death. Come for the anecdotes about Alan's mom asking Gandolfini to make less violent shows for her to enjoy, stay for Matt describing the Soprano star's love for the Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Erin and Elizabeth dissect the final stretch of episodes of the series (aka season 6b or season 7, depending on whether or not you’re an executive at HBO) and we explore the numbness inherent to Chrissy's failure to thrive, Vito's son's shit sandwich of an adolescence, AJ's nervous breakdown, Tony's inner and outer monster, the Soprano curse, and Dr. Jennifer Melfi's doorknob-comment moment for the ages.

In which Erin and Elizabeth recap season 6a (aka the first 12 episodes of “season 6”) wherein friction between fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, and brothers from another mother all come to a head. First in the form of a near-death experience that bores him for Tony; a heroic effort at vengeance gone wrong for AJ; a futile attempt at sobriety in the midst of new fatherhood for Christopher; and truth among lies for the orphaned children of Vito Spatafore.

On this episode, Erin and Elizabeth looking at The Sopranos’ acclaimed season 5, “Two Tonys,” and the show’s handling of race, sex, and the characters’ performance of gender. Once again, we’re joined by The Sopranos Sessions authors and TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz (New York Magazine) and Alan Sepinwall (Rolling Stone), and we’re also hearing from a new voice: Mel Magazine contributor Chingy Nea, whose article “The Sopranos Belongs to the Gays Now” examines the show’s surprisingly queer underpinnings. We also look at how Tony's issues with self-definition reflect our own issues as a society, as two decades worth of new viewers use the benefit of hindsight to unpack what these character studies and the authorial choices of David Chase have ultimately said about the downfall of earth itself.

Tell Me About Your Father’s Sopranos series continues with the second episode of our four-part deep dive into the heart of darkness of our favorite TV dad Tony Soprano, with our guests Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, authors of The Sopranos Sessions. We discuss Season 3 and 4’s’ portrayal of violence against women, the breakdown of Tony and Carmella’s marriage, Tony’s connection to his daughter (and her tip-toeing towards an awakening about who her father is), his disdain for his misunderstood dumb-dumb son and heroin addict nephew, and his love for a horse. All this underlines the generational cycle of abuse, bathed in the harsh light of Tony’s hypocrisy and pathological self-centeredness. What does it mean for a father to betray his family within the Family? Could Tony even begin to know?

Tell Me About Your Father is relocating to New Jersey for the next few episodes and immersing ourselves in the fathers, mothers, children, generational trauma and crystalline dysfunction of the Soprano family. We’ve also got two very special guests joining us across the entirety of these episodes: The Sopranos Sessions authors and critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, the foremost experts on this show and all things that make David Chase tick. In this episode, we talk with Matt and Alan about their 20+ year relationship with the show, the genius performance of Nancy Marchand as Tony’s albatross of a bully mother, Livia, and the AWOL fathers of this series. Erin and Elizabeth also take a closer look at Tony’s separate dynamics with his kids, Meadow and A.J., his violent hippie sister, Janice, and his fatherless nephew, Christopher. We’ll be back next week to look at the show’s challenging third and fourth seasons, and, marrone, Tony and Carmella’s marriage.

Alex Scordelis joins Elizabeth and Erin for "Daddy Issues" this week, and this early-fall episode is the equivalent of a therapeutic apple-picking trip. Scordelis, a writer for Billy Eichner’s deeply hilarious Billy on the Street, and Eichner and Julie Klausner’s Hulu triumph Difficult People, is also a rock journalist and regular contributor to the L.A. Review of Books. Listen as Scordelis tells Elizabeth and Erin about his two-year-old son’s enchantment with the Beatles and calling his wife “my boy,” his Neil Young cover band the Cinnamon Boys, and the time he interviewed Courtney Love and she tried to marshmallow-test him by conspicuously placing the manuscript of her still unpublished memoir on a coffee table in front of him and then leaving the room. We also talk about the deadbeat dads of Congress, Mick Jagger at the Thirsty Beaver, the TikTok trend Devious Licks (where kids partake in the time-honored tradition of destroying school bathrooms), Dog the Bounty Hunter, Cazzie David’s rebuke of the internet delighting in her father’s New York Fashion Week pain, and Erin tells us about the time her husband drove over a ziti in her honor.

Sheila Anderson was just 14 years old when she started helping her CIA operative father on his assignments spying on Russian targets during the height of the Cold War. Today, in her first-ever interview about the memoir she's writing about her extraordinary relationship with her dad, Do You Have a Raincoat, you'll hear what it's like to figure out at age 10 that daddy has a secret life. When most of us were in boring old high school, Sheila's coming of age was filled with international travel, multiple aliases, dangerous missions and a world-class education in the art of manipulation. Sheila speaks astutely about the psychological fallout of trying to unlearn those skills as she parents her three sons, but there's lots of humor too, and you'll want to hear about her dad's second act in retirement and how he influenced his daughter's own career as an interpreter for some of the world's most powerful leaders. She also lets us in on how accurate shows like Homeland and The Americans really are...