Former 1310 The Ticket hosts Dan McDowell and Jake Kemp feel more free than they've felt in a while. On Tuesday night a judge's order announced the case between them and Susquehanna Radio, the Ticket's owner, has been resolved, meaning the duo's podcast, The Dumb Zone, can keep producing new episodes. A short Tuesday night episode was released shortly after the judge's ruling, where Kemp read a statement short saying the resolution was "mutually agreed upon."
On Wednesday afternoon, the pair released a longer episode, opening it with an audio clip from The Shawshank Redemption where Morgan Freeman's "Red" talks about crawling through "500 yards of shit-smelling foulness." In the minutes afterwards, McDowell and Kemp express a bit of relief at how their nearly 2-month legal battle is now behind them.
On the episode, McDowell began to move forward, noting that the future of The Dumb Zone is still being determined. For now, listeners must pay to access the episodes on the Patreon platform, but that might change down the road.
"There are some attractive options we haven't even looked into," McDowell said on the Wednesday episode. A bit later, the clearest sign that the lawsuit their former employer brought against them is history was introduced when Blake Jones, the former producer of McDowell and Kemp's show on the Ticket, joined the episode and announced he would be joining his fellow Ticket ex-pats from time to time. Jones left the Ticket near the end of August.
Ending the the lawsuit with a settlement began to seem more likely than letting it go to trial in December when a federal judge denied Susquehanna's request for a temporary restraining order against the podcast on Sept. 15. The summer-long sequence has presented the Ticket, one of the area's most popular stations with a scenario it has never faces in its prosperous three decades.
The former hosts of 1310 The Ticket’s midday The Hang Zone program left the station over the summer, announcing their status on July 20 on Youtube after prolonged contract negotiations fell apart. The pair, who had been together as co-hosts since 2020, quickly moved to start their new podcast venture, unveiling their first The Dumb Zone episode on July 25 for the nice price of $6.90 a month.
The brief period between the duo’s departure from the station and the beginning of their new venture was at the heart of the legal drama. Only a year removed from another substantial shake-up of station personnel and the recent emergence of an upstart competitor featuring many beloved former Ticket voices, the popular Marconi Award-winning 1310 has entered more uncharted terrain after experiencing a blissful, largely stable time period few stations in North Texas could hope for.
In August, Susquehanna Radio issued McDowell and Kemp a cease-and-desist order, claiming the men were violating their contracts’ noncompete clauses. In a move that was only surprising to anyone who had never listened to the Hang Zone, McDowell and Kemp wasted no time in having a little fun with the legal letter for their quickly growing listenership. Within the first few weeks of podcasting on the Patreon platform, The Dumb Zone has attracted nearly 5,000 subscribers.
Once it was clear The Dumb Zone would neither cease nor desist, their former employer sued the pair, claiming that the new show is nearly “identical” to their old show. For nearly two weeks in late August, there were no new episodes, but since Aug. 29, the episodes have been released on a steady schedule.
Susquehanna, and its owner, Cumulus Media, wanted a judge to stop that.
In an order filed on Friday, Sept. 22, United States District Judge Karen Gren Scholer ruled that Susquehanna “failed to ‘clearly carry[y] the burden of persuasion’” regarding the requirements one must meet to have a TRO request granted.
Now, we’re sure it’s just a coincidence, but The Dumb Zone opened its first episode following the judge’s bench ruling with a well-known audio clip from the classic film Apocalypse Now, when Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore waxes about how he enjoys the “smell of napalm in the morning,” then adds that "it smells like victory.”
After being more freewheeling with their comments regarding the case in the podcast’s earlier days, McDowell and Kemp aren’t saying much publicly about it right now. Perhaps that’s because things have gotten a tad contentious between the two sides in recent weeks.
“The hosts of ‘The Dumb Zone’ are not, in fact, being dumb.” – Sharon Block, Harvard Law School professor
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An attorney for McDowell and Kemp told the Observer that the defendants, as well as the rest of their legal team, including former Dallas city council member and former Observer contributor Philip Kingston, have agreed to not grant interviews or provide comments to the media for the time being. For their part, the attorneys representing Susquehanna Radio did not respond to our requests for comment.
It seems as though the agreement to not speak about the case in public was made at some point this month, because plenty was being said prior to September. Both McDowell and Kemp gave interviews after leaving the station and didn't shy away from a certain amount of legal chatter on their show, wherein Susquehanna claims they “mocked” the actions taken against them. Kingston, who co-hosts the Loserville podcast, spoke rather openly about the case during an Aug. 31 episode.
Along with getting into some of the details regarding the case, Kingston took some shots at opposing counsel. When discussing the plaintiff’s claims that the new podcast has taken listeners away from the station, Kingston had some thoughts.
“I guess I should feel bad for making fun of the Ticket’s legal team,” Kingston said not too long after he called out one the opposing attorneys as being way overpaid in his estimation. “But they have been such jerks that I kinda don’t. So, it’s an absolutely stupid theory.”
At the center of this case was a debate over noncompete clauses. It’s long been a standard item in contracts for on-air radio personalities to be kept off the air for six months after leaving their station. McDowell and Kemp said that since their new venture is a podcast behind a paywall (Patreon) that releases episodes at varying hours, among other differences, it wasn’t the same as joining another radio station. Thus, they believed, it was not a violation of their noncompete clauses. Susquehanna, however, countered that it was close enough.
The Dumb Zone hosts also claimed the noncompete clauses were overly broad and were not legally enforceable. With likely thousands of radio personnel under contracts with similar clauses, Susquehanna, and arguably all other massive radio conglomerates, stood to be handed a devastating defeat should the podcast with a funny name find victory in a trial.
The potentially seismic nature of this local case caught the attention of many well beyond the Ticket’s already massive audience. On Monday, The Washington Post published a story noting that a bit of fortunate timing might work in the duo’s favor, thanks to a May ruling that broad noncompete clauses may violate federal labor law.
“And that is giving hope to McDowell and Kemp, who are seeking to have the lawsuit be one of the first test cases for the new interpretation,” the Post article reads. “At stake is not just the future of the co-hosts’ musings about the Dallas Cowboys schedule and Disney casting controversies, but also the status of millions of other workers across the country affected by noncompete clauses that many economists believe unfairly restrict workers’ options.”
The Washington Post, which sent a photographer to McDowell’s house to take pictures of the hosts and the show’s apartment garage studio, asked a Harvard Law School professor to review the case. Professor Sharon Block said that McDowell and Kemp are onto something with this case, perhaps the most intriguing such scenario we’ve seen in North Texas media in recent years.
“The hosts of ‘The Dumb Zone’ are not, in fact, being dumb,” Block told the Post. “Part of having agency in your own economic life is being able to take your skills, join with your co-workers, and bring them to where you think they’re best utilized — and in this case the hosts were being sued because they were trying to do that.”
