Avid listeners of Wondery podcasts will have a determinedly positive mindset turning on Dax Shepard’s Mom’s Car. Alongside his best friend, Aaron Weakley, they hop into his wife Kristen Bell’s motor and deliver food while chatting to guests about their lives. All of this is simultaneously being filmed for YouTube, so the audio ends up sounding like a recorded conversation instead of a podcast. From the outset it’s all a bit vague, using the first five minutes of its foremost episode, with Bell herself, guessing, at length, the width of a bus. The listening atmosphere is then filled with constant nasal laughter and references to ‘crazy’ stories, the details of which are frustratingly withheld.

The food delivery process isn’t used to forward the narrative, outside of hearing a door slam, and there doesn’t appear to be much content in the first episode until a Reddit story is thrust in late on. Hurtling into a deep discussion about cheating in relationships, Bell brings depth, trying to answer questions in a way that will impart some wisdom about life phases and accepting new milestones in a healthy way. Acting as ‘America’s Mom’, she makes a clear attempt to raise core themes of the podcast and tie them together.

In the following episodes, guests such as Deadpool’s Karan Soni do a decent job of keeping the conversation on track (and essentially running the interview) but vulnerable discussions about life, addiction and recovery are interrupted by stale 90s humour and shameless namedropping. At one point, Weakley even remarks, ‘I almost forgot this was an episode’, perfectly illustrating the podcast’s inherent problem. Having listened to other car-based pods, this feels muted in its technique, with forced guffaws becoming tiresome and falling short of being something a Wondery devotee might turn on again.

New episodes of Mom's Car are available every Tuesday.