Meet My Friends the Friends is a recap podcast hosted by Tom Scharpling of The Best Show fame. A labor of love, each episode recaps an episode of The '90s Sitcom Friends featuring different segments such as "Fun Friends Facts," "Rank the Friends," "This Day in Friends History," and much more.
Except not really. In Meet My Friends, Tom really plays a fictionalized version of himself who is very defensive about jumping on the recap podcast bandwagon. Each episode is littered with technical incompetence, and the conversation is often derailed by on-again-off-again engineers Jason Gore and Pat Byrne, to Tom's never-ending irritation. Really, the whole thing serves as a big Take That! to cash-grabbing, fad-chasing podcasting, as all of Tom's own "sponsors" are purely fictional and often weirdly aggressive.
As of 2022, the podcast has recapped up through the fourth season of Friends, consisting of four seasons of its own.
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- Abusive Advertising: The ad copy is often super aggressive, with sponsors like "caviar.net" calling out their competition for selling "slimy fish eggs" and presenting an offer code that actually raises the price on an order instead of taking money off.
- Berserk Button: Bad-mouthing the show is a huge pressure point for Tom. He spends entire episodes distracted by bad reviews from AV Club.
- Big Bad: Season three slowly reveals Don Strong to be a stern, iron-fisted podcasting tyrant who ropes his talent into ridiculously binding contracts, as well as physically abusing them if they flub any information on their show. Jason learns this the hard way.
- Commuting on a Bus: Jason and Pat float in and out after their respective introductions, disagreements, layoffs, etc.
- A Day in the Limelight: Both episodes of "Taking the Leap" focus on Jason and Pat's Quantum Leap recap podcast with only passing reference to Tom.
- Foil: Jason and Pat serve this roll to one another. Whereas Jason is typically disinterested in Friends, Pat is overly-enthusiastic about it, and happily assumes the role of co-host with Tom. Whereas Jason is a lot more confident and overreaching with his comments, Pat is more meek and easy to push around. Whereas Jason is actually good at his job as an audio engineer, Pat vehemently struggles to produce bumpers with any technical competence, and accidentally destroys the audio board with sparkling apple juice after celebrating the completion of his first decent bumper. Naturally, they butt heads in the studio.
- Hostility on the Set: In-universe. Jason makes no attempt to hide his disdain for Pat when they're both in the studio, usually assuming the role of The Bully by drawing attention to Pat's technical incompetence.
- Jump Scare: The "Line of the Episode" bumper is intentionally aggressive, and sometimes it plays when the sound on the board is accidentally set too high.
- Padding: Invoked. Tom will almost always try to talk over the intro music to keep it from feeling too long, then immediately complain about how it sounds unnatural.
- Show Within a Show: "Don Strong's Taking the Leap, Hosted by Jason Gore" is alluded to many times before finally taking up an episode slot within the show's third season.
- Sick Episode: Despite Pat's insistence that it was just allergies, he spends an episode sniffling, passing it off to Tom in the very next episode.
- Take That!: The whole series serves as one of this to recap podcasting. There are in-universe accusations that Tom responds to during episodes, assuring listeners that the show is "not a cheap cash grab."
- Theme Tune Extended: Unfortunately for Tom, this is actually the only version of his podcast theme, and he'll usually complain that he's Padding in his intro just to keep the song from sounding unnecessarily long.
- Troll: Jason assumes this role after the first season. Once Tom fires him, he goes and starts his own Quantum Leap podcast, often deleting files off of Tom's computer and holding them hostage to get free advertising.
