Kal Penn’s new show, Kal Penn Approves This Message, takes on the same divisive political issues often debated on cable news—but his approach is totally different. “Cable news is not a place where you’re going to get these nuanced conversations and young people don’t watch cable news anyway,” Penn told me.
The series, which debuted with a six-episode season on Freeform in September, has just dropped the season finale (on Freeform last night, and streaming on Hulu beginning today), focuses on young viewers—Millennials and Gen Z—and Penn says he finds them far less entrenched in the partisan divide than their parents. “Younger audiences are so good at coming up with creative solutions to things and we can't expect that things will be changed if we only continue yelling at each other. So we wanted to provide with our show an opportunity for people to come together and focus on the complex nature of specific issues.”
In this standupkid conversation, I talked to Penn from Toronto, where he’s shooting a new series for CBS and living in a “monitored quarantine, because they believe in science up here.”
STORIES FROM THE LAST 7 DAYS:
In Episode 5 of the podcast, I talked to Arnon Mishkin, director of the Fox News Decision Desk, about the new tool Fox News will use this Election Day to determine how the race between Trump and Biden will break—a tool that Mishkin believes gives Fox much more insight into early voters and voters who used absentee ballots, which may be critical in being able to make a call in the 2020 presidential the race.
At Forbes:
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Episode 6: Kal Penn, Kal Penn Approves This Message