The Linda Eldridge Program

‘The Linda Eldridge Program’ is a confusing blend of two different stages of YouTube - the early days of sheer chaos and quick cuts along with the current style of videos paced with a frenetically loud energy. No doubt this style of web series has its plaudits, but you’d be hard pressed to find any that aren’t either high or above the age of 14.

It plays almost as a riff on workplace sitcoms like ‘The Office’, but aiming to merge such a style with a talk show setting and some of the most chaotic camerawork and editing leaves one of the most nauseating, brain-numbing experiences this critic has seen, second only to spending five minutes on TikTok.

It is probably worth mentioning first and foremost that Linda Eldridge is barely a character in her titular show. She’s an acclaimed talk show host, played by Sissy O’Hara, who mysteriously disappears, though that doesn’t lead to any resolution in terms of plot. Instead, we are introduced to a peculiar band of amateurs who take over the show in Linda’s absence, leading to hijinks and a series of bizarre segments you most certainly won’t see on your regular talk show.


The new host, excellently named Anthony Pepperchino (warranting a star alone), has discovered a man who proclaims to be Eminem’s biggest fan and decides to put on a game show to test the man’s knowledge of the rapper. The fan not being named Stan is the obvious misstep here, but the bigger problem is the lack of substance to anything. It’s all far too much, too in your face, too fast. The kind of media which can only appeal to a very niche audience - the kind with an attention span so numbed by brainless swiping that watching something so flashy and exuberant that probably works for a ten second TikTok clip is no hard task.

The issue is, that for anyone else that doesn’t fall into that group, this is borderline unwatchable. None of the humour lands, and the pastiche of them overemphasising their pride in Rhode Island wears off real quick, as do any of the recurring Eminem gags. References to controversial, well-known figures are symbolic of a lacking screenplay, which firstly lacks substance and secondly appears to believe that something is funny just by being weird. Instead of creating laughs this creates groans of despair, which isn’t helped by the editing, cutting abruptly and placing impromptu memes in between cuts is enough to drive anyone crazy, especially when mixed with bizarre jumps and angles. The purposefully amateur camera quality also becomes tiresome, eventually just another tiring attempt to appear as though it was made at the dawn of YouTube.

Though Anthony Pereschino does an amiable job fronting the program as Pepperchino, all the moving parts surrounding him are simply woeful. Without a plot, without a succinct script, and crucially edited and directed by a madman, it’s an exercise in patience and paracetamol to watch all the way through. An attempt to appeal for an audience lacking media-literacy in it’s perceived ‘quirkiness’, ‘The Linda Eldridge Program’ is disturbingly bad.