How Grief Fueled a Podcast. And Then Sixty More.
Dina Gachman David Gardner Texas Monthly Pat Burr Michael Hardy Patricia Sharpe Rose Cahalan Russell Gold Wendi Aarons Robyn Ross
Stephanie Wittels Wachs’s Lemonada podcast network was born of her brother’s death. It’s since drawn in the likes of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Meghan Markle.
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Texas Monthly
As a kid growing up in southwest Houston, Stephanie Wittels Wachs transformed her parents’ living room into a performance space. She’d put makeup and costumes on her younger brother, Harris Wittels, directing him in full-scale plays she’d dreamed up. That early passion for the stage led to courses at Houston’s musical theater company TUTS (Theater Under the Stars), followed by a degree from the performing arts high school HSPVA, which is the holy grail of high schools for many creative kids in Houston. Back then, before podcasts were even a thing, Wittels Wachs never could have imagined she’d wind up cofounding Lemonada, an independent podcast network and soon-to-be publishing imprint with Simon & Schuster. Lemonada is home to 61 shows (and counting), hosted by celebrities like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Duchovny, and—coming soon—Meghan Markle. You know, the Duchess of Sussex.

Wittels Wachs credits much of her drive to the city she grew up in. “I spend so much of my life defending the honor of Houston,” she says. “It has world-class institutions. There’s theater, opera, ballet, museums, galleries. There’s no beautiful topography there, butI had such a culturally rich experience growing up.”

After high school, Wittels Wachs did leave Houston, for New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her brother, Harris, eventually headed to Los Angeles, where he quickly became a beloved comedy writer and performer, working on Sarah Silverman’s Comedy Central show and then as a writer and executive producer on Parks and Recreation. As her brother’s career took off, Wittels Wachs headed back to Houston to raise a family and teach acting at HSPVA. Then, one day in February 2015, she got a terrible call. Harris had died of a heroin overdose at his home in Los Angeles. He’d been in and out of several rehab facilities, but he was about to start a new phase of his career, costarring as Aziz Ansari’s best friend in Netflix’s Master of None. He was thirty years old.

In 2016, just a year after Harris died, Wittels Wachs left teaching to cofound Houston’s Rec Room, an intimate downtown space dedicated to bringing innovative theater to the city. Rec Room is still going strong, but in 2019 she discovered yet another purpose. She connected with Jessica Cordova Kramer, who reached out to Wittels Wachs after hearing her speak about Harris on Nora McInerny’s podcast, Terrible, Thanks For Asking. Cordova Kramer had recently lost her younger brother to an overdose, and the two of them bonded over the shared desire to ask one burning question: Could we have done anything differently to save our brothers? From that single query, their first Lemonada podcast was born: the Webby Award–winning Last Day, in which Wittels Wachs interviews people about the last day (sometimes literal, sometimes not) of someone’s life. The show’s first season, transmogrified into narrative form, is also set to become one of the Lemonada imprint’s first books.

“Jessica heard me on that [Nora McInerny] podcast and had an acute feeling of ‘This woman is telling jokes and using complete sentences and she’s probably wearing pants, so maybe I can get through this.’ That unifying feeling of hope, that’s the lightning in a bottle,” Wittels Wachs says. “Everything we’ve built [is] around that feeling.”

What started as two women setting up mics and searching for answers quickly grew into a media company with more than fifty employees and hubs across the country. The cofounders started brainstorming Lemonada’s mission statement six months before the COVID-19 pandemic, and their instincts about what people wanted and needed to hear proved prescient.

“We had an idea that everyone was lying awake at night stressing about things they couldn’t talk about during the day at work,” says Wittels Wachs. “It started from our barrel of lemons, and the idea was always that life is hard, and our mission was to make life suck less.”

Lemonada launched when Wittels Wachs was living in a townhouse in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood with her husband and young children. When the pandemic shutdown happened, she found herself cut off from all the things she loved about her hometown. There was no theater or opera happening. Galleries and museums were closed indefinitely. There was just the heat, the bugs, and a cramped space with a tiny yard, plus two young kids and two cooped-up dogs. For the first time since her years in New York, she thought about leaving Texas. She and her husband had talked about moving to Los Angeles, but instead, they found a house on Zillow five hours up the coast, in Monterey County, which was somehow cheaper than any home Wittels Wachs had found in Montrose. Monterey, if you’re not aware, is where the fictional mansion-dwelling mamas of HBO’s Big Little Lies live. It’s a place where a roofless shack could go for millions. Or so Wittels Wachs thought. “I was like, ‘There is no way this is real,’ ” she says of the Zillow house. “It was crazy town.” Despite her doubts, the family bought the home, piled into an RV, and headed west.

Leaving Houston for “John Steinbeck country” was an adjustment. First, Wittels Wachs had to break the news to her parents, with whom she is incredibly close, especially in the wake of Harris’s death.

“My family and I are completely enmeshed,” she says. “We’re entirely codependent in all the good and bad ways. When we said we were moving, there were a couple of weeks when it was a little tense, but ultimately there was no question my parents would come. They’re so close to my children, and an integral piece of fabric in this quilt we’ve made.”

Now her home office is near the Pacific Ocean. She meets with her creative team at Lemonada, developing shows and hearing pitches, trying to decide which ones will resonate with the largest audience. Is an idea timely and relevant? Does it hit on issues that seem to be bubbling up in the culture? She says most of the staffers are “type A older sisters. We love a rubric.” They’ve created a Lemonada scorecard that helps them determine which shows to take a chance on. A key ingredient, of course, is the host. Are they the absolute right person to bring a topic to listeners? Are they passionate about hosting, or will it just be a side gig for them? Even though someone as beloved as Julia Louis-Dreyfus could probably host a podcast about dish soap and make it entertaining, the team went through an in-depth development process before launching her hit show Wiser Than Me, in which she interviews older women such as Jane Fonda, Billie Jean King, and Amy Tan about the life lessons they’ve learned with age.

Wittels Wachs says the “bigheartedness” of the people in her home state is something she brings to her work. “I lead from the heart,” she says. “I can get on a call and make small talk with anyone, anytime. That approach to people I do attribute to being from Houston and the South. That smile-for-a-stranger mentality is just so integral to how I lead and approach the world and everyone in it.”

It’s also how she collaborates with the hosts on each show. David Duchovny, star of The X-Files and Californication, launched his Lemonada podcast, Fail Better, in May. Wittels Wachs says when the team met with him, it didn’t take long to realize that because he was so keyed to the topic of failure, he was the right host.

“Julia wants to be prepped to the max, and David likes to go off the cuff,” she says. “David is the smartest guy you’ll ever speak to. He’ll tell you the etymology of every word you say. He’s so well-read and nerdy and brilliant, so it was that David Duchovny, the one who is fascinated and obsessed with the idea of failure, that made us think it could be a hit show.”

In addition to the slate of shows currently running, Lemonada is developing a new podcast called Squeezed, hosted by Yvette Nicole Brown and created in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It will feature health-care providers, care workers, and caregivers who work with diverse populations. And then, of course, there’s the Duchess of Sussex’s new project, which doesn’t have a launch date just yet.

When I ask Wittels Wachs about the months of prep and research that go into a single show, she shrugs and says, “It takes a long time to cook a great meal.”