This just increases my respect for Gimlet and ReplyAll. Up front, honest, and genuine apologies that are actual apologies; they name their specific failures, the impact of those failures on those who they hurt, and set a higher bar for themselves to reach in the future. And, they have separated themselves from the organization, to allow the other people to do their jobs and move beyond these two individuals' stories and failings. Honestly, I can't say I wouldn't have been PJ had I been in his shoes. There are any number of startups I worked for that struggled mightily to achieve some stability and success... and the push for unionization at those delicate junctures would have destroyed the fragile businesses. I too would have been childish and belittling to those who thought that unionization wouldn't immediately destroy the thing we'd worked so hard to build. I would've been defensive and nasty. I'm sure of it.
I hope they don't shelve this story completely - it was quite interesting. Probably unrelated, but I felt Reply All was getting a bit stale in the past year, I was attributing it to the Spotify acquisition but now I see there's even more going on. As for the diversity at RA - didn't they just name Emmanuel Dzotsi as one of the official co-hosts? And Sruthi has been a producer for a while. To me, it seems more like they were anti-union, not against diversity. But it's hard to make these judgements from outside.It was always intended that this miniseries was to be Sruthi’s last story for Reply All before she moved to other projects at Gimlet, but instead, she will be stepping back from the show immediately. The Reply All team and I will be discussing the plans for The Test Kitchen in the days ahead.