Millennial podcast review – ‘insightful, and Megan Tan is much more likable than anyone in Girls’

“How millennial. To make a podcast about being a millennial,” begins Megan Tan’s series about, you know, being a millennial, making your way through your twenties in the age of austerity.

Tan speaks to those for whom the podcast is a hard sell, but despite millennial hardships (in her case: no job, the prospect of having to move back into her family home after graduation), there is a suspicion that this might be another bit of self-indulgent navel-gazing. After all, it’s hard to look sympathetically at a world that has been choked by Lena Dunham’s oversharing, overbearing aesthetic and find much substance beneath the narcissism.

Thankfully, then, Millennial is insightful and Tan is much more likable than anyone in Girls. She is ambitious, wry (she soundtracks the potential move back to her parents with Road To Nowhere by Talking Heads) and has the gently optimistic pep of Mindy Kaling’s character Mindy Lahiri. Even so, you can’t deny there is a level of Dawson’s Creek-like earnestness seeping through Millennial. In episode one, for example, Tan says she was concerned about taking the wrong job because she was worried about getting an “empty heart”.

Despite this, Millennial is a consistently engaging podcast. Tan’s audio autobiography feels like an authentic study of the twentysomething condition in 2015; caught between an economic landslide and an uncemented sense of self, millennials, we are told, are defined by their contradictions. In episode one’s snappy montage, the ones in Tan’s world appear to be the types who have volunteered on Machu Picchu but never had a full-time job. This is the generation whose infrastructure is collapsing beneath their feet and, by episode two, the mask of Tan’s ambitious bluster comes a little undone. Left with the prospect of another internship that might not work out, she talks her way through her angst to a friend on the phone. “I have high expectations of my life and when I don’t fulfil them I feel like a failure,” her voice cracking, before admitting: “I don’t have any answers.” It’s an emotionally alive moment which feels, well, very millennial.