Call Her Alex Isn't a Portrait of Alex Cooper—It's an Infomercial for Her Brand

Time​ Magazine

a day ago

In the breakout third episode of Call Her Daddy, the podcast's co-hosts, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, encouraged a male listener to track his crush's movements via Snapchat, advised a woman that there was no need to tell her boyfriend about her sugar daddy, and plotted to sell dirty Coachella shoes to foot fetishists. But the bit that really made 'Gluck Gluck 9000,' posted on Oct. 3, 2018, a classic was Cooper's lively and detailed description of the eponymous, supposedly game-changing oral sex technique. Six years and three days later, Cooper hosted an episode of the same podcast in which she posed to Kamala Harris, then the Vice President of the United States and Democratic candidate for President, questions about mental health, reproductive rights post- Roe, and the economic challenges facing young people.
How did the Call Her Daddy that launched, not so long ago, as a chronicle of two 20-something Lower East Side roommates' X-rated exploits evolve into the ultra-mainstream Call Her Daddy of today? The short answer is that Cooper and Franklyn's cheerfully raunchy banter quickly attracted an audience of millions and just kept getting more popular, fueled by successive deals with the fratty platform Barstool Sports, then Spotify, and now a three-year Sirius XM contract reportedly worth $125 million. A more illuminating explanation for the show's expansion into a media empire would require an understanding of who Cooper—a solo act since Franklyn's departure in 2020—really is. The Hulu doc Call Her Alex presumably exists to offer such insight. But in just two scattered episodes (whose release as a series rather than a feature probably comes down to marketing), it's less a portrait of the podcaster than an infomercial for her brand.
Directed by Ry Russo-Young (Nuclear Family, And Just Like That) and, crucially, produced by Cooper's company Unwell, Call Her Alex takes a form so typical of the authorized 21st century celebrity documentary, it's become a cliché. Behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper preparing for her first tour, which she's determined to make more exciting than the live tapings that comprise so many podcasters' events, is paired with a roughly chronological origin story. In the present, tension builds around troubled rehearsals of a program that includes musical numbers where Cooper is flanked by male dancers. The pressure to give her beloved listeners, known as the Daddy Gang, an unforgettable night seems insurmountable. An anxious Cooper seeks comfort from her unflappable husband and business partner, Matt Kaplan (a figure so adored by the Daddy Gang, some audience members carry giant cutouts of his face). Of course, as the trope dictates, last-minute disasters give way to an unequivocally triumphant opening night.
The biographical portions can feel evasive—weirdly so, considering that messiness and candor are central to Cooper's brand—often swerving away from uncomfortable topics. She recalls escaping the pain of boys' bullying, as a skinny redhead, by bonding with other girls on the soccer field and making videos with friends. Then, suddenly, the awkward childhood photos are replaced by images of the perfectly proportioned and coiffed blonde she'd become by the time she matriculated at Boston University. There's no talk of how this glow-up might've affected her personal life or career, or the messages it might send to skinny redheads who worship Father Cooper, as she calls herself. The defining contradiction of Call Her Daddy, like Cosmo and the 'female chauvinist pigs' of Y2K pop culture, is its frequent implication that female empowerment requires catering to male desires. But Russo-Young never really interrogates Cooper's gluck-gluck feminism.
Also conspicuously downplayed is the Cooper-Franklyn split, a perennial hot topic for the Daddy Gang. Talking heads who lived through it allude to a breakdown of the women's personal relationship as well as their professional partnership, as they renegotiated their initially meager Barstool contract—old news. Cooper doesn't have much to say about this. And while Barstool's controversial founder, Dave Portnoy, who also became a character in the contract drama, offers a few anodyne words of praise for Cooper in the doc, Franklyn is only glimpsed in archival footage. Anyone hoping to learn more about the end of the friendship, which isn't necessarily unreasonable for fans of a show premised on the intimacy of girl talk, will be disappointed.
Still, Cooper is too savvy to put out a product entirely devoid of revelations. The morsel of news that started circulating in the days leading up to the series' release concerns the accusations of sexual harassment she levels in Call Her Alex against a since-retired BU soccer coach. Framed by Cooper's return to Boston for her tour, her story of a female coach who she says pried into her sex life and touched her inappropriately and used the students' scholarships to manipulate them—and of the university's alleged refusal to act on her scrupulously documented complaint—is infuriating. (Boston University has yet to comment on these allegations.) It also complicates Cooper's memories of soccer as a safe space and her choice to build a career around what is often euphemized as locker-room talk, though those aspects of the ordeal are barely explored. Instead, it's framed as yet another chance for Cooper to demonstrate her strength and tenacity. 'I was so determined,' she says in a voiceover that accompanies her stroll across an empty BU soccer field, 'to find a way where no one could ever silence me again.'
Cooper is indeed a force—shrewd, ambitious, dynamic, hard-working. She knows her worth and fights for it. But that much has been obvious for years, to anyone with a casual awareness of her ascent to media-mogul status, as she's built an empire that now includes a media company (Trending), a podcast platform (Unwell Network), and an electrolyte drink (Unwell Hydration). The Daddy Gang certainly gets it. Which raises the question of who the audience for this documentary is supposed to be. Potential business partners, maybe? Watching Call Her Alex, at times, I felt as though I was being pitched a product: an empowered woman whose brand is female empowerment.
All this marketing detracts from an element of Cooper's personality that is far more fascinating and rare and, I think, critical to her appeal than the stuff Russo-Young focuses on: she's great with people. The glimpses we do see of her interactions with fans are among the doc's highlights. When an audience member at one of her tour dates tearfully recounts how Call Her Daddy helped her cope with her father's death from cancer, Cooper calls her up to the stage, gets her a chair, sits at the young woman's feet, holds her hand, listens and reacts to every sentence of her story.
Any performer could go through these same motions, but Cooper's care and curiosity—whether she's talking to a fan or a disgruntled employee or the most powerful woman in U.S. history—always come across as genuine. When she tells someone 'I f-cking love you,' which she often does, it sounds like she means it. This is probably why so many of her Gen Z listeners have likened her to a big sister. Yet she's something more complicated, too, a comforting but also aspirational figure, whose ugly-duckling-to-sex-goddess-swan transformation has left her with an unusual combination of empathy for the everygirl and the charisma to make that Daddy Gang diehard feel special. In a world that plays mean girls against mere mortals, she plays the part of the people's Regina George, her burn book replaced by an endless supply of sincere compliments.