The Cancelled Podcast Lore
This is a very internet-y topic, but I'm going to make a case for giving Tana Mongeau, Brooke Schofield, and the Cancelled Podcast a shot. Gossip! Humor! And two best girl friends yapping.
If you're on the same part of TikTok that I am, then you definitely caught Brooke Schofield's "Who The F*ck Did I Marry? (Brooke's Version)" series. If not (I’m assuming everyone who reads this post has no idea what I’m talking about….), I need to explain this wild story and the two wild girls who share these stories weekly on their hit podcast, “Cancelled.”
Cancelled is a pod where Tana Mongeau (pronounced Tana Mojo) and her best friend, Brooke Schofield, sit on a huge couch together in Tana’s home and have long-form girl chat.
Sometimes they have guests like Jelly Roll and his wife Bunny, comedian Trevor Wallace, Summer House alum Hannah Berner, or repeat offender Trisha Paytas. They oscillate between discussing their traumatic family past and sharing funny tour bus stories. Right now, they’re the #8 podcast on Spotify, recently ranking above Call Her Daddy.
In order to understand why the podcast works and why it’s so popular, I need to fill you in on the girls…because Tana and Brooke are some characters with quite a backstory.
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Tana
Where do I begin. Tana Mongeau is not new to the internet at all. I simply don’t have enough space in this Substack to explain her whole past, so I’ll try my best to give you the spark notes.
Tana got her internet fame in 2017 from being a YouTuber. She did story times about her wild life growing up in Vegas. Emphasis on wild. She was in a throuple with Bella Thorne and Mod Sun, she fake married Jake Paul for YouTube views, and she had her own version of a Fyre Festival when she attempted to put on TanaCon (like VidCon).
To put it lightly, Tana isn’t very brand-safe. She’s done plenty of controversial things, said plenty of controversial things, been involved in YouTube scandals, and has generally just been a hot mess during her long career as an Internet personality. But she also only just turned 26…she dropped out of high school at 16, and she was a girl who grew up in Vegas.
She often talks about how her parents never actually parented her or even seemed to want her as their child and how if this internet fame hadn't come to her she probably would’ve become a stripper. In fact, she doesn’t communicate with her parents at all after they tried to sue her for all of her money.
I don’t want to excuse Tana’s controversies, but I will say she’s been in this space for a long time now and she knows how to play the game. Tana is the quintessential example of “there’s no such thing as bad press.” In a lot of ways, she starts this internet drama because she knows it keeps her popular. Also, if you didn’t read between the lines, Tana has been a party girl. So that means most of her wild stories and drama have been dr*g and alcohol-fueled.
On that topic, I think part of why I’ve been open to Cancelled and come around to kind of liking Tana (something I thought I’d never say) is because Tana is now California sober. No more Xanax, no more black-out alcohol nights. As a viewer, without her vices she seems much more engaging, reliable, and understandable. Hopefully she continues to take care of herself because she’s clearly lived a lot of lives and been through a lot of sh*t.
Brooke
Tana and Brooke met through mutual friends when Brooke was roommates with a girl named Lilah, working at Catch and trying to get into showbiz. But we need to rewind in Brooke’s story first.
Brooke is from Chandler, Arizona where she had a tumultuous upbringing—her parents were both drug addicts, so her mom’s parents adopted her and her sister. She went to college at the University of Arizona for three years studying pre-med to become a nurse before she dropped out and moved to LA.
After meeting Tana, she became a part of the friend group and the rest is history. Both Tana and Brooke used to be crazier and messier in their past—for instance, a noteworthy story they’ve shared and now joke about is when Brooke kissed one of Tana’s ex-boyfriends. They started the Cancelled podcast together in 2021, and as a result, Brooke has also gained an influencer status like Tana.
Brooke is an ideal counterpart to Tana. She’s a regular at the influencer gym spot, Alo. She sports Aritzia and Anthropologie outfits. She lives alone and has a cute little gray cat named Murphy. She’s the brunette to Tana’s blonde. Upon first glance, she can seem incredibly wholesome.
But these girls are friends for a reason…they’re not as different as you think. Brooke loves to have some fun, and she’s amassed some interesting dating stories that she shares on the pod. The first infamous one led to the cancellation of rising comedian Matt Rife: she had been dating him for awhile when he not only told her multiple times that he thought she wasn’t funny, but he also serially cheated on her with several other girls in several other states, and then he ghosted her.
This brings me full circle to Brooke’s “Who the F*ck Did I Marry?” TikToks. While I recommend you binge the series, to sum it up, two years ago she dated musician Clinton Kane (if you don’t know who he is, don’t worry neither do I he’s irrelevant). He invited her to a show, took her out on a date to the beach and told her he was in the midst of grieving the death of his brother, father, and mother, that he was from Australia, and he grew up rich near Perth. He isolated Brooke whenever they were together and was fairly manipulative.
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He went on the Zach Sang show and talked about the death of his mother, but he and his team demanded the video get taken down because some of the comments said that his mom was still very much alive and he’s from Brunei. Brooke saw this and discovered he lied about being from Australia (and faked a whole ass Australian accent), being rich, and that his mom and brother died….his dad actually did die though. Oh and also, he was cheating on her. An insane story, and a great one to share on a couch with your best friend for one of the top podcasts.
Why Cancelled Works
Critics could call it brain-rot or dumb girl talk, but I’ve gotten hooked on them because it feels like perfect girl humor or silly chats with your friends. I do often compare them to early Call Her Daddy episodes when the podcast was still Sophia and Alex Cooper before their breakup because they make you feel like you’re the third chair, listening in on them genuinely being friends. It’s a skill needed in the podcast and social media space…you need to make your audience feel like these are your genuine conversations and feelings whether the camera and mic are there or not.
I also think a part of why authenticity like this works is it’s almost like modern-day cinéma vérité. We’re all so accustomed to being aware of the camera and social media that we, the audience, can tell when others are putting on an act for it. Tana and Brooke are honest about the stories in their lives, unafraid of being embarrassed or canceled because they’ve been there before.
But they’re also honest about the fact that they plan out the topics ahead of time, combing through their personal lives for stories they feel ready to share and record. They discuss on the podcast that they rehearse their live shows and often record their episodes multiple times until they feel it’s right, yet the podcast episodes feel as if they just turned on a camera and mic mid-conversation.
Their stories and their lives are real, don’t get it twisted. And I don’t think Brooke and Tana do it intentionally, but these subtle elements break down the distinction between their lives B.C. (before Cancelled) and A.C. (after the cameras). If you want to think about it a little too hard, their openness about the performative nature of influencer and internet culture just point at the facade.
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Go ahead and cancel them, but they’re showing you that everyone like them could be canceled too if you want to pull back the curtain with them, Wizard of Oz style.
