Transcript of Introducing: Everyone Knows But Me

Hey, Love Trapped listeners. Today we wanted to share a sneak peek of another podcast we think you'll love. It's called Everybody Knows But Me, and like Love Trapped, it was named one of Apple Podcasts' best shows of 2026 so far. Hosted by comedian Holly Brown, the series kicks off with her real-life family secret. At 17 years old, while her father was dying of cancer, He confessed that he had secretly fathered 6-year-old twins. Twins that everybody else in Holly's family already knew about. Everybody but her. Now Holly sets out to figure out how her entire family kept a secret that big, to meet her twin brothers, and find out what happens when she starts sharing some long-held family secrets of her own. Everybody Knows But Me is also steeped in the backdrop of sitcom nostalgia. Holly grew up on TV sets while her dad worked behind the scenes on some of the biggest shows of the era, and every episode opens inside the fictional sitcom version of her life. It's like true crime meets '90s nostalgia. Here's Everybody Knows But Me.

Did you ever feel like your life was a TV show? If millions of people were tuning in every Friday night to see what kind of crazy antics you and your family and friends were getting into, do you think they'd be watching a sitcom or a drama? I know what you're probably thinking right now. You're probably saying to yourself, Uh, Holly, life's not that simple. Sometimes it's hysterically funny and sometimes it's fucking horrifying. That's me, by the way. I'm Holly. Holly Brown. Nice to meet you. And trust me when I say I agree with you. But I hope you won't think it's cliché when I also say that growing up, I genuinely believed my life had to be scripted. I desperately wanted it to be a sitcom so badly. I mean, I was the daughter of a man who literally helped build sitcom worlds for a living. Growing up in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley in the '90s, show business was part of our physical reality, something you could come face to face with every day. Especially since my dad, Mark, worked behind the scenes on the kind of shows that made families look perfect. Or at least perfectly dysfunctional.

Are you out of your mind? A gun just went off in here! Niles bought a starter's pistol. And there's no need to get Snippy, accidents happen, you know. Oh, I'm sorry, was I snippy? I didn't realize it was too much to ask that there not be gunplay in my living room!

I always assumed that's where my intense love of sitcoms came from. Those tidy 30-minute universes full of love, lessons, and the kind of laughter that only exists because a producer is holding up a sign telling a live studio audience how to react.

What do you think of me now?

Oh.

Sitcoms didn't just play in the background of my childhood though. They consumed it. My dad worked his way up through Hollywood from being a best boy— and no, that's not a tiny little groomsman in a wedding— then he paid his dues in various other roles behind the camera, eventually establishing himself as the lead man in the art department. And as a Hollywood-obsessed kid, I loved being on set with him and going to tapings. Roaming the Paramount backlot felt like a dream filled with recognizable sets and celebrities just existing like normal. I thought it was so cool that my dad played basketball with George Clooney and chatted with Michael Keaton like it was nothing. But more importantly, he got me original art from the Rugrats.

The Rugrats!

And Salem Saberhagen's paw print signature from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Salem, is this a desperate cry for help?

No, this is, help! I'm running out of air! Zap it off and gimme mouth-to-mouth!

I mean, these kinds of things made me feel pretty special. Different from other kids. In my house, our furniture was mostly props from Frasier sets. A pair of bar stools, a wooden hutch, our dining room table. I'd sip my chocolate milk from the same Cafe Nervosa cup as Frasier Crane and think, see, my life is a TV show. But as I got older, I started to wonder if maybe it wasn't that I loved sitcoms because my dad helped create them. Maybe I loved them because I needed to believe my life could become one. That this world I was living in, the one filled with intense sickness and screaming Matches, where pain pills and silent prayers for someone to step in and save us were all conveniently off camera. It all felt so unbelievably cruel and absurd that it had to be cooked up in a writer's room. Because if it were scripted, maybe it could be rewritten. Maybe it could still have a happy ending. When you stripped away the props that filled our house, the autograph book signed by my TGIF heroes, the golf cart rides around the studio lot as a kid, you'd actually see that my life was anything but wholesome family fun.

In reality, the worst things that could happen always did. But just like the spotless sitcom-perfect sets my dad helped build, Everything looked fine from the outside, and people saw what we wanted them to see. Or maybe what they wanted to see. Everybody wants to believe in a happy family, right? After all, ours pretty much looked the part with all the tried and true stereotypes. The kind mom, the older sister on the honor roll, the rebellious middle child, the zany little brother, and the perfect sitcom dad. Tim the Toolman Taylor. Danny Tanner.

Me, Al.

Al Bundy.

Do I come to the hag shop bother you when you're working?

Carl Winslow.

Almost lost it there.

My old man could steal the show with the best of them. He looked like a sitcom dad too. Dark hair and broad shoulders, a mischievous grin he'd flash right before doing something ridiculous. His looks and likability always reminded me of John Ritter growing up. If John had been just like a lot more rough around the edges.

2 glasses of white wine, please.

I'll have the same.

I think everyone sort of idolized your dad because he had such a strong personality. He could take over any room he walked into, take over Any party we were at, he always wanted to perform. He always wanted to entertain people. And he did for years. He, he just was somebody that I think a lot of people looked up to.

That's my Aunt KJ, one of my dad's 4 siblings who knew full well that in a family so big, you had to have something special to stand out. And that didn't end once he grew up and left home to make it on his own. No matter what my dad did, his charm and imagination knocked you off your feet. Take movie night. In our house, movie night wasn't just throwing on a VHS. It was an event. Before every movie, we were served by our butler, Jeeves, who bore a striking resemblance to my dad in a ponytail with a British accent and a napkin draped over his arm.

Dad like primed us to believe in everything though. Like we, we just lived in a kind of magical childhood. I don't remember what he did. I just remember the towel and his British accent and that he had, um, he had 3 kids. Jeeves had 3 kids in England named Yisac, Leehal, and Sunkar. So just Pig Latin versions of our names, I guess.

I forgot about this.

And he would tell us all about his kids in England who were shockingly similar to us. In so many ways, but British.

My older sister Casey, who you just heard, has some conflicting memories about exactly which version of him had the ponytail. Because after all, he did have multiple characters. There was also Bob the Bowler, a fast-talking pro bowler from New York, New Jersey. Eh, the region is fuzzy, but our local bowling alley was his stage.

You know, I think you think about it when you're an adult and maybe people would be like, what the heck, guys? Have you really thought you had a butler that flew in from England? But like, you know, we'd be— we would drive up to see our grandma and grandpa. They lived like 3 hours north of us in California, and you drive past the ocean along most of the way. And our dad would be driving, and like, I mean, this man was a trained actor, the most convincing. He'd be like, guys, guys, did you see that? Did you see that? And you'd be like, no, what? He's like, I saw a mermaid tail out there. I can't believe you all missed it again. But it, you know, you're living in a world where like mermaids are real, fairies are real. Fairies and sprites. Sprites and Snickers.

Music was another part of his magic. My dad was music in every sense of the word.

We would sit as a family and just wait for him to come home so he could play whatever new song he wrote.

Really?

About our family. I mean, I know you've heard all the Christmas songs he wrote and all the Thanksgiving songs and all the wedding songs, but he always wrote very personal songs. I wish that we had a recording of our wedding song, and I asked him way too late to please record it, but he was so sick he couldn't. Yeah, he's like, I can't.

Yeah.

I can't do it. I can't do it justice. But I— it was beautiful. It was a beautiful song.

He'd play Beatles songs so well on his guitar that I thought he must have been in the band himself. He could listen to a song on the radio and without a single lesson play the melody on a piano every time. He wrote songs for his siblings' and nieces' weddings and recorded an entire album in our garage that I swear to you Holds up. Tell me this country song doesn't slap. I dare you.

Gather round, my family and friends so dear. I'll sing y'all a story if you'll lend me your ear. About a midnight ride back some 50 years. And you could say my grandpappy was Paul Revere.

Wherever we went, my dad carried an energy that pulled people in. He talked to every cashier, asking them about their day as though it were the most interesting conversation he'd ever had. He'd tell stories about jumping onto moving trains, driving his motorcycle off a bridge, and doing so many drugs that I'd say, Dad, oh my God! And you believed him? Not because the story sounded real. I'm honestly not sure what was and what wasn't. But because he did, everybody put my dad on a pedestal. Everybody.

He was just everybody's friend, everybody's hero.

I mean, how could they not see him that way? He was the epitome of main character energy. He was the funniest man I've ever known, always committed to making someone laugh. And for the better part of the last decade, I have been too. Timeout. You know my name, but you don't really know me. I'm a stand-up comedian who shares a little too much of herself on stage. If you're asking yourselves, much like I did, well, Holly, Urban Outfitters, they don't have public restrooms. Did you shit your pants? Well, no, idiots. I shit their pants. But there are some things I've never been able to talk about openly. Talking about them openly means I lose control of the narrative, which honestly scares the shit out of me because I spent most of my life with zero control over what was happening to me. And really, it means I'm gonna finally have to confront a bombshell that my dad dropped on me almost 15 years ago, one I've been actively avoiding ever since. A secret that forced me to reckon with what family secrets do to you And how they quietly rearrange everything you thought you knew.

Okay, so this is the part in the sitcom where the theme song kicks in. I pull up in my cool-ass convertible in front of a totally nondescript suburban house. I walk up to the door, my key hits the lock, and as it turns, the title slams onto the screen. Everybody From Next Chapter Podcasts and Companion Arts, this is episode 1, The One with My Dad's Confession.

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