Tuesday, October 6, 2026 — There is a new podcast network in Los Angeles, and it comes with a comedy club attached. Drew Spears Productions (DSP), the L.A. production house, studio, event livestream innovator and comedian collective, has officially launched DSP Podcasts — the podcast production and distribution arm of the company — on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. The launch arrives with two brand-new titles: Runiverse Weekly with Ru Anderson and Animalia with Charlie James and Griffin Kelly, with a third show, Comics Reading Comics with Nick Malis & Shoshanna Green, slated for later in the fall.
The announcement, carried as a press release by Podnews, frames DSP Podcasts as the natural next step for a company that has spent years building the rooms, the rigs and the community that comedy needs — and is now formalizing the podcast pipeline to match. After a soft launch in which DSP-original podcasts have been releasing weekly for months, the network is now official, with a launch party to match: an industry-exclusive, invite-only event at DSP Studios featuring an introduction and panel discussion with DSP Podcast hosts and creators, MC'd by comedian Patrick McDonald.
The two launch titles
Runiverse Weekly is a weekly episodic talk show built around host Ru Anderson's thesis of the week — a claim Anderson states and then investigates, with the help of expert guests, researched facts, and personal stories and anecdotal evidence. The thesis topics, according to the launch announcement, range from the philosophical ("perversion is important") to the deeply personal ("Ru's cat, Miriam, is possessed by the devil"). It is a format that rewards a host willing to commit to the bit and then do the homework — the comedy comes from the collision between a wild premise and a genuine attempt to prove it.
Animalia, meanwhile, is a chatty science-comedy podcast hosted by animal enthusiasts Charlie James and Griffin Kelly. Each week the pair presents a different fascinating animal, makes each other laugh, and shares stories from friends and fans. The science-comedy space is well-trod — it is one of podcasting's most durable formats — but it lives or dies on host chemistry, and DSP is betting that James and Kelly have it.
Both shows launch October 6 alongside the network itself. Comics Reading Comics with Nick Malis & Shoshanna Green follows later in the fall, with a launch date and more details to be announced.
A home with a roster, not a roster with a home
One of the more telling details in the announcement is how many shows are already living under the DSP roof. The newly launching titles join a slate of DSP Podcasts companions already releasing weekly episodes: Help Me Be Black with Skyler Higley, How Do You Get Through The Day with Will Hines and Ian Roberts, Mollyworld with Molly Lambert, No Contact with Hay Beacon, On God with Matt LeGrande, All These Wonderful Things from Cinema Eye Honors, and Paul Cherry's Hidden Gems.
That matters because it tells you what kind of network this is. DSP Podcasts isn't launching with two shows and a dream — it's formalizing a community of creators who were already making things in the same building. According to the announcement, DSP is "a brick and mortar comedy clubhouse for creators helping each other to pursue their most ambitious dreams" and "an inclusive art collective finding their audience in a supportive, local-to-global community." The network is the distribution layer; the clubhouse is the product.
Frog Town's comedy experiment goes official
The company behind the network is worth understanding on its own terms. Drew Spears started DSP in 2021, springing from his work as a screenwriter, actor and comedian. The origin story is pure pandemic-era tinkerer: stuck in covid isolation, Spears developed an obsession with the technology of combining streaming, analog tech and vintage televisions. "I bought nine vintage TVs, put them together on the wall and wired them up so that I could feed my computer into them," Spears has said — the start of a growing collection of retro equipment he spent his isolation amassing and studying.
From there, Spears and his film school friend Chad Bond spent two years building out a physical space — originally conceived as a hub for equipment and studio rentals, or a crew for hire on one-off shoots. But the company's mission drifted toward something more urgent. As Spears tells it, much of the middle-class work for comedians was drying up — online comedy hubs and cable comedy channels disappearing — and DSP aimed itself at the space they left behind, with some crossover into the void left by record label hubs and musical collectives.
Today DSP is led by founder Drew Spears, with Langston Alimayu and Anya Solotaire running operations. The company is known for its Frog Town brick-and-mortar studio and event space — in what the announcement calls the "now-comedy hub of Frog Town" — and as a livestreaming partner to flagship L.A. events, including a recent reading by the cast of The Pitt at the Writers Guild Association Benefit and Paul F. Tompkins' renowned variety show Varietopia.
"A need and responsibility to protect comedy"
Spears doesn't mince words about what DSP is for. "I feel a need and responsibility to protect comedy," he said in the launch announcement, arguing that comedy "has been on the rise through tech and social media, but it's getting served on the same platforms as AI slop and content designed to fry our synapses." The alternative, as he frames it: "You can either treat comedy like expendable content, or you can treat it like something to be curated and worked for." DSP, he said, treats it like something to be curated — "and we want to work with people who cannot stop themselves from creating weird, esoteric things, because DSP is just the space to create them in."
That philosophy — small, scrappy, rooted in experimentation and a DIY ethic — is the throughline of the whole enterprise. The announcement's summary of the company could double as a mission statement for the network. "A great live show shouldn't disappear when the night ends," according to the announcement. Podcasts, in this telling, are how you keep the night going.
Why this launch is worth watching
The independent comedy podcast world has been here before — collectives form, networks launch, rosters shuffle — but the ones that endure tend to share DSP's structure: a real physical space, a real community of performers, and production infrastructure that exists whether or not any single show takes off. DSP Podcasts has all three on day one, plus a livestream operation that gives its events online reach most indie networks can't match.
The open question is the same one every new network faces: which shows break out. Runiverse Weekly's thesis-driven format and Animalia's science-comedy lane are both proven shapes; the differentiator will be the hosts. And with Comics Reading Comics arriving later in the fall, the network has a second wave already loaded. For a company built on the idea that weird, esoteric comedy deserves a curated home, the official launch is less a beginning than a ribbon-cutting on something that was already happening in Frog Town.
DSP Podcasts is live now, with Runiverse Weekly and Animalia launching this week. For more podcast coverage, see Fox News Media's launch of the podcast the Girls, our look at the latest podcast waves on Spotify, and the full Previously podcasts hub.
