Pandemic sparked Kim Murstein and Grandma Gail's viral dating podcast

Kim Murstein’s move from New York City to her grandparents’ home in Palm Beach, Florida, during the pandemic turned family dinner conversation into a media product with real scale. What began as dating talk with her grandmother, Gail, became Excuse My Grandma, a podcast launched in January 2021 that now sits at the center of a broader appetite for personality-driven media built on intimacy, conflict and advice.

The format is simple and sticky. Gail, the older voice in the room, offers blunt old-school relationship counsel while Murstein serves as the modern-dating foil, translating apps, uncertainty and changing norms into a generational back-and-forth. That tension has helped the brand grow beyond audio into a viral social presence, with recent reporting putting Excuse My Grandma at more than 1 million followers.

The appeal is not just novelty. In the post-pandemic media market, audiences have shown strong interest in creators who turn private relationships into repeatable content, especially when the premise feels lived-in rather than manufactured. Murstein and Gail’s draw comes from that mix of family familiarity and public performance: the same conversations that might once have stayed in a kitchen now travel as a shareable product, with the grandmother-granddaughter dynamic doing the work of both entertainment and advice.

The relationship has also changed as the audience has grown. A 2023 profile described Gail as 83 and married for 60 years, and Murstein as a Cornell University Class of 2018 alumna. Gail has said she hesitates more before criticizing Murstein now, in part because Murstein is almost 30 and has to make her own mistakes. That shift matters because it shows how the podcast has become more than a dating bit; it has turned into a public record of how two generations revise their expectations of each other.

CBS featured Murstein and Gail on the June 25, 2026 episode of CBS Mornings, underscoring how far the project has traveled from its pandemic origins. Charlie Davies was listed alongside them for the broadcast, a sign that a once-private family conversation has become a national media asset with enough reach to compete in the crowded attention economy.