True Crime Obsessed’s Patrick Hinds is taking his show on the road

We introduced you to True Crime Obsessed a few years ago. The hilarious podcast, hosted by Gillian Pensavalle and Patrick Hinds, takes a tongue in cheek look at true crime documentaries and cases covered on shows like Dateline and 20/20. True Crime Obsessed has had over two hundred million downloads with an outstanding group of listeners. In 2022, TCO made history by being the first podcast to play live on Broadway. 

Most recently, Patrick co-hosts The Golden Girls Deep Dive podcast, where he and two-time Tony nominee Jennifer Simard (currently starring on Broadway in Death Becomes Her) unpack every episode of the beloved series with humor and fascinating behind-the-scenes trivia. Each episode closes with an in-depth exploration of intriguing stories from the show’s universe.

Patrick is also the author of the hilarious memoir and national bestseller Failure is Not NOT an Option which was released in Fall 2023. He took his hilarious stories to cities across the country as the creator, writer, and star of the touring show “Patrick’s Traveling Book Party”, which has been playing to sold-out crowds across the US and in London.

With even more stories to share, Patrick is once again hitting the road with a new show and tour, “An Evening with Patrick Hinds: Laughs, Drinks & DRAMA.” This time around, he recounts a “hilariously disastrous evening” spent with Golden Girls star Bea Arthur and the unexpected arrival of his newborn daughter, Daisy. Along for the ride is Bea Arthur impersonator Jason B. Schmidt, who appears via video as Bea from beyond the grave to give her take on this whole ridiculous situation.

We had the chance to chat with Patrick about the upcoming tour, being an author, the enduring success of True Crime Obsessed and more in our exclusive interview.

Let’s talk about the tour. I noticed that a lot of the venues are already selling out.

I intentionally chose small venues. I did a version of this last year. I was calling it my book party tour before my book came out and I went and read a chapter of my book and had some slides. It was a fun sort of show. It was a fun thing. This tour is like kind of the next level of that, which is, it’s two chapters from the book that are sort of put together. One of them is about like this disastrous night I had with Bea Arthur and she just hated me and so we hired this Bea Arthur Impersonator and we shot all this video with her.

So, we have Bea Arthur via video, sort of playing herself, sort of giving her take on the whole story and this time, the story is memorized, so it’s going to just be me standing and sort of telling the story with all the video clips interacting with Bea Arthur, which is going to be really fun.

This is the next sort of wave of what I want to do. I want to take this storytelling event and just keep doing it with different stories. You know, these two are from my book. The next one won’t be. It’ll be an original story when I do this again. And, you know, I keep saying half of it is come and listen to a funny story and laugh and the other half is then we all go to the venue’s bar. We’ve worked out deals with all the venues where we get the bar for at least 90 minutes after the show for just us and it’s meant for me to get to be able to meet everybody and to bring people together, make friends in their own community.

We’re going to be doing interesting things at the show as well. We’re going to be giving people buttons if they’re traveling solo and they want to meet people, or if they’re traveling with a group and they’re open to people and making new friends. We’re just going to make it more interactive that way, to bring people together in their community.

What do you enjoy about touring?  

First of all, I love telling these stories. I love making people laugh. I love being up in front of people and really engaging with the audience. But, I think my favorite part, when Gillian and I were touring, we would do the show and then we would stay after and just do like a meet and greet for anybody who wanted to say hi, and in some cities, the meet and greet was longer than the show.

It was just a real opportunity to like put names with faces. We would see somebody, they would tell me their name and I knew them from the Facebook group and I would get to meet them for the first time. Or, you know, just really get a chance to like connect with listeners one on one and make that human connection.

Gillian and I go and we sit in the booth and we do this thing, but it’s just us – and sometimes we forget that people listen and then we get to sort of interact with people online or at drag bingo or whatever, but to get to meet the listeners in real life and really talk to them and really get to know them a little bit.

It’s also a chance for them to get to meet each other. We’ve had so many splinter groups from the Facebook group, the Salt Lake City group is a good example. They met at a live show and now the group is really active and they get together once a month for brunch and they’re all friends and they’re all in each other’s lives.

We’ve always been about building community and bringing people together. It’s always more than just the show for us. It really is about the community that has sort of grown up around the show. And so, it’s all of those elements. It’s the performance part, the getting to meet people part, and like the people getting to meet each other part.

I love the community the show has created. I just think it’s amazing that people are just so supportive and Interactive with each other. No other podcast really does that.

Yeah, and we work really hard at it. You know, we have hired a full time Facebook moderator Her name is Sash and she’s now running the book club and getting people excited about that. She keeps the Facebook group a really sort of fun and safe place to hang out on the internet.

And, you know, I make another podcast too now, it’s called “The Golden Girls Deep Dive Podcast”, which I make with a woman named Jen Simard and we do recaps of the Golden Girls, but we also give the history of the show and we do deep dives into all of the actors’ lives and the guest actors and things about it. We have a Facebook group for that, that’s growing really quickly and that’s also really active and you know, The Golden Girls has their own fandom. They have their own community, so it’s sort of nice to get to tap into that and bring people together in that way too. 

I wanted to pick your brain a little bit about like how you put together your book and telling those personal stories. What was the process like of getting that whole book together?

I had always really wanted to write a book of funny personal essays. I was really inspired by Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling and David Sedaris. I had those 12 funny stories that I always would tell at parties or whatever and I finally was like, it’s time for me to really put this together. It’s not so much an autobiography but I wanted to go in chronological order. And once I put my mind to something, I kind of just become crazy until it’s done. I wrote the whole thing, I want to say in about six months.

I just would do my work week and then my weekends were dedicated to writing. I would try to get a rough draft of a chapter every weekend that I was working on the book. I mean, it was as simple as going back through journals and remembering things and talking to my family and my friends that I’ve been with for a long time, assembling all of the pieces and then just writing. In the beginning, I was really careful to not self-edit to just kind of like let myself write these stories. Our agents paired me with a writer, so I was writing all the jokes and sort of free form writing and then I would meet with him and he would help me shape it into what I wanted. I wanted it to just be really funny and he was really helpful and being like, no, there’s a lot of heart to this story and we need to focus on, the emotional highs and lows.

And then it was giving the rough draft to people that I trusted, like my husband, and being receptive to feedback. It was a really fast process. It was helped by the fact that these were stories I’d been telling for a long time. It was stressful and hard but it was very fun.

Were you surprised at how successful the book and the subsequent tour were?

You know, I wasn’t so surprised. I know how big our audience is, so we had a general idea of how many people might buy the book. I was over the moon to see how many people wanted to come out and hear me tell the story. That was so exciting. I was thinking today that Kansas City had like 500 people at that show. And you know, the original idea was to do like 10 shows. I think by the end of it, we did 52 shows in 40 cities.  It became almost exactly a year of my life, maybe even a little bit longer. It’s one of the most fun things I’ve done in the last couple of years. 

You had mentioned you were going to tell some new stories. Do you have another book in you?

100%. That’s what I’m thinking about now as I’m doing this tour. Right now, we’ve announced seven cities. I think, all told, there’ll be probably 40 cities that I’m going to do. And, as soon as I have this show memorized, and I feel like it’s up on its feet, I’m going to start working on the next show. I have my thought for the next one, I haven’t even told my husband this, but my thought for the next one is I want to sort of tell my adventure stories, like the handful of times I’ve ventured into the woods for various things and the shenanigans that have sort of ensued from that or what my takeaways from that have been. I’ve been a dad now for 10 years, I’ve been married for 17 years, we sort of only touch on that a little bit in the first book, so I definitely have more stories to tell.

Are you still doing Obsessed? 

No. We had the Obsessed Network for several years, you know, and we had a bunch of shows that we made with friends, and the shows just grew and grew and as the shows grew, I kind of just became less interested in running a podcast network. It was a really fun thing that we sort of started during the pandemic. We made a bunch of successful shows with friends and they seemed ready to take them and be free with them. I remember the days of looking at my Google calendar and I would have a full week of just back-to-back meetings. I’m just a creative person, you know, all I really wanted to do was just create and make more podcasts that I was either doing or do more live touring or whatever it was, work more on TCO. And so, we gave the shows to the creators and said go with God and good luck. They all seem to be thriving. And so, we’re doing our thing and the Obsessed Network stuff is pretty much over. 

There’s no stopping for TCO though, right?

TCO is going to keep going. Gillian and I always say we are going to make TCO until 10 years after our deaths! We record about four episodes a week now between the Patreon and the regular feed. We started out making 46 episodes a year, we went to like 56 or something and now we make 75 regular episodes per year plus 50 Patreon episodes. We are in the booth at least twice a week and there really are days that feel like it’s the first day, you know, it’s still very fresh to us.

We still have so much fun doing it. We’ve learned a lot. One of the things that we started doing this year, we’ve done it in the past, but we sort of started to focus more on it this year was finding subjects from the documentaries and bringing them in for interviews and even going further behind the scenes of the documentary and getting more of the stories. That’s the thing that we want to be doing more of. So yeah, TCO is going strong. 

Get tickets and more information about Failure Is Not NOT an Option and Patrick’s tour here. Check out True Crime Obsessed and The Golden Girls Deep Dive Podcast wherever you stream. Follow Patrick on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.

Last update on 2024-12-19 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API