3 Minute Review
3 Minute Review (3MR) was a podcast created and hosted by Mike Merrill, co-hosted with his then partner Kathryn, in which the hosts and a rotating cast of friends and family review something they have just experienced in three minutes. It ran for 1,211 episodes between August 5, 2019 and August 21, 2025, making it the largest sustained body of recorded work in Merrill’s catalog. Originally a movie-review show recorded immediately after a screening, it gradually evolved into a daily micro-podcast documenting the texture of ordinary life.
Concept
The premise is contained in the title: review something in about three minutes. Episodes run from roughly 2:48 to 4:22, with most landing near the three-minute mark. The format is conversational and unscripted, recorded in the moment rather than edited into a produced segment.
The first episode, recorded on August 5, 2019, reviewed Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, watched at a 10:30am showing at the Americana at Brand in Glendale, California. The early template was consistent: Merrill and one or two friends would see a film, then record their reactions on the spot. The opening run reviewed Gemini Man, Terminator: Dark Fate, The Lighthouse, and Between Two Ferns: The Movie, among others, with guests rotating through each episode.
Evolution
Over six years the show drifted away from its movie-review origins. By 2025 the episodes had become short, emoji-titled vignettes about daily life rather than criticism of films. Late entries carry titles like “Wind Down,” “Over Couped,” “Cute House,” and “Canadian Mushrooms,” and their descriptions read as diary fragments rather than reviews. The “review” had quietly expanded from films to the day itself: meals, moods, travel, the small events of a shared household.
This drift is part of what makes 3MR distinctive. What began as a structured exercise (watch a movie, talk for three minutes) became a long-running, low-ceremony record of a life, accumulated three minutes at a time across more than a thousand entries.
The creative network
The early guest roster draws from the same Portland and Los Angeles creative circle that recurs throughout Merrill’s work. Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, both of the band YACHT and later collaborators on Blippo+, appear as guests in the show’s first weeks. The connective tissue runs back to Urban Honking, the collective Merrill co-founded around 2001, and forward to his later productions. 3MR is one of the more informal expressions of that network: not a project with a budget and a publisher, but friends turning a shared experience into a recording.
Self-hosting and the michaelwavetheory.com migration
For most of its life 3MR was hosted on Anchor and distributed through Spotify and Apple Podcasts. In June 2026, as part of standing up michaelwavetheory.com as an owned podcast network, Merrill started a migration of the show onto his own infrastructure:
- The full archive of 1,211 episodes (roughly 3.3 GB of audio) was moved to michaelwavetheory.com.
- A browsable, playable episode index was published at michaelwavetheory.com/3mr.
The final step, redirecting the Apple and Spotify listings to the new feed, was deliberately held for a future date so that the established subscriber base is never put at risk.
The architecture was built to generalize. The feed, audio, and listing are namespaced per show so that additional podcasts can be added to the network as drop-in siblings.
Significance
3MR is the clearest example of Merrill treating media as a daily practice rather than a product. There is no season structure, no monetization (beyond some sporadic patron support, thank you patrons!), and for long stretches no editing. The value is in the accumulation: a six-year, thousand-plus-episode record built from three-minute increments.
The 2026 self-hosting move also reflects a principle that runs through KmikeyM: own the platform you depend on. Pulling the archive off a third-party host and onto an owned feed is the same instinct that drives Merrill’s preference for portable, self-controlled systems, applied to six years of his own recorded life.