Score: 5

Olivia Harrison • Daily Beast • Sep 18, 2022

"...you immediately get the sense that both Madison and Marquardt have done an incredible amount of preparation for the podcast. The podcast seems like a mechanism for genuine processing for the hosts. Listening to Girls Next Level now is like getting to visit old friends. Marquardt is still bubbly and upbeat...she never invalidates Madison’s more negative views of events. Like all rewatch podcasts, Girls Next Level feeds listeners’ nostalgia. It allows us to revisit early aughts reality TV and the culture of the time: the fun parts, like Juicy Couture tracksuits and blindingly shiny silk dresses, and the ugly parts, like the rampant misogyny that was inflicted on the women of the Playboy mansion by Hefner and even each other. But it hits differently than any other podcast of this kind because what happened on The Girls Next Door and behind the scenes is so much more complicated than your average television series. That’s what makes it so much more worthwhile."

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