The Greatest Generation - Podcast Rankings and reviews

Imagine, if you will, a courtroom where sarcasm is admissible as evidence, wit is required by law, and the judge is wearing a Starfleet uniform—but ironically. That’s The Greatest Generation. It’s not so much a Star Trek podcast as it is a self-aware improv trial where the defendants are Gene Roddenberry’s legacy and the hosts’ own sense of decency.

Benjamin R. Harrison and Adam Pranica—if those names sound made up, it’s because they feel engineered in a sarcasm lab—don’t so much discuss Star Trek as weaponize it. Their humor is fast, biting, and delivered with the casual precision of a character who’s had five double espressos and one moral awakening before 9 a.m. And their scorbic retorts? Oh, they don’t just roast bad episodes. They reduce them to subatomic snark.

There’s something comforting about two men who love Star Trek just enough to mock it relentlessly, and who mock each other just enough to prove they love each other, platonically, with all the affection of two emotionally constipated Vulcans on shore leave.

In a world where fandoms teeter between blind reverence and joyless cynicism, The Greatest Generation dares to ask the question: What if we replaced nostalgia with neurosis, and reverence with roast comedy? And what if that’s exactly what Star Trek needs?

It’s a podcast for people who love Trek, hate themselves just a little, and know that behind every sarcastic sigh is a profound respect for warp cores, Picard speeches, and the quiet tragedy of a man named Reginald Barclay.

Do yourself a favor: subscribe. Unless you’re too busy being offended by a fart sound during a plot summary of “The Inner Light.” In which case, you’ve already lost this courtroom.

I tuned into Greatest Generation as part of the Pod Crawl, and rewound back to the beginning of the series right away. Adam and Ben are my age, so not only the lens through which we first watched TNG but also the surrounding pop culture references they toss out are exactly my jam. The show's great, and I've started donating scarves to Max Fun (this after listening to Judge John Hodgman for years). Middle of season 4, they comment about people feeling low about politics (after the 2016 election), and alas it echoes exactly now why I'm mainlining Greatest Gen now and not my usual array of Slate and NPR podcasts - the humor and escape from this embarrassing program is exactly what I need. I look forward to catching up to Greatest Trek.

No other Star Trek podcast has prompted me to seek out and watch a forgotten hobo killing medical thriller starring Gene Hackman and Hugh Grant. Best podcast around if you like hosts who will reference an obscure movie so many times you’ll eventually go “Alright! FINE! Where can I rent it??”

Irreverent. Silly. Touching. These are just some of the ways I would describe the greatest generation podcast. I’ve been listening since the third episode and it’s consistently one of my favorite podcasts of all time.