Donor Dad is a podcast co-hosted by television producer Adam Saltzburg and Karamo Brown. The premise: Adam donated sperm in his early twenties while beginning his career in Hollywood, and those donations have grown up into an estimated 26 children. The show documents Adam’s process of telling his family — his wife Lindsay, his sister Sarah, his parents — and reckoning with what connection to these children might look like. Karamo, who has his own unexpected paternity story, serves as co-host, comedic engine, and accountability partner.
What This Work Does Well
The show is trying to address a real problem with real warmth: media coverage of sperm donors tends to focus on people with god complexes. The desire to push back on that framing, to show a donor as a full human being navigating an unusual situation with care, is legitimate. Adam’s openness about a decision he made at 22 — its motivations, its consequences, his evolving understanding of what it means — feels sincere.Â
His family demonstrates something that could be valuable. His wife, Lindsay, encounters the situation without defensiveness or possessiveness. Sarah’s first instinct when she hears the news is “I want to meet them.” Adam’s parents respond with generosity. For families navigating similar conversations, that modeling might be useful.
Karamo as an accountability partner also matters. Across episodes, he’s the one asking Adam the harder question: Have you actually processed this?
What Bothers Us
Donor conception discourse has long organized itself around two poles: donors and the parents who used them. The people actually conceived have historically been treated as beneficiaries of other people’s decisions rather than as people whose perspectives might help frame the entire picture. In its first season, Donor Dad replicates this structure even as it seems to be trying to complicate it.Â
Most of the children in Adam’s network are minors who haven’t yet had the chance to form or express their own views about contact. The adults in the room — Adam, the mothers, Karamo — speak about what the kids might feel, need, and hope for. The show presents one possible future as if it were the only one: that these children will want to know their donor, will benefit from his presence, will experience his openness as a gift. That may be true for some of them. But no donor-conceived voice is present to complicate, confirm, or correct any of it.
There were some attempts at humor that made us cringe, like the discount sperm joke and the Nick Cannon comparison. The show knows sensationalization is harmful — Adam says so explicitly in Episode 2 — but these moments contradict that message. They’re worth naming because they point to the same gap. When donor-conceived people aren’t in the room, it’s easier to make a joke.
Karamo’s own paternity story brings real emotional depth to the show. He discovered at 25 that he had a 9-year-old son he hadn’t known existed and intentionally built a father-son relationship from there. But that experience is structurally different from donor conception, and the difference matters. Adam’s donor-conceived children were conceived intentionally, hopefully with knowledge that a donor was involved. They may be navigating something that looks quite different, and the emotional templates Karamo brings don’t always map cleanly onto what donor-conceived people actually face.
There’s also the Reddit episode. When criticism emerges about donor conception practices, the show engages with a conservative framing — the “fatherless homes” argument, the deadbeat accusation — and rebuts it, as they should because the evidence is there. But the discourse in donor conceived spaces often centers on something different: limits on the number of offspring per donor, the failure of self-reporting systems, the experience of discovering you have dozens of half-siblings, what it means to have your genetic origins treated as a commercial transaction, and the impacts of incomplete medical history. That version of the critique never makes it into the conversation.
What We’re Hoping For
A show with this much genuine interest in the subject has the raw material to go further. Karamo Brown has built a career on bringing stories to audiences who might not otherwise encounter them through his own unexpected paternity story, his work on Queer Eye, and his willingness to hold space for vulnerability without sentimentalizing it. What’s more, he has the platform and the credibility to go somewhere most mainstream media hasn’t. The show promises “the messy beautiful emotions that come with discovering who you are.” For some donor conceived people, that’s exactly right. For others, donor conception is a fact of their origin story that sits quietly alongside everything else they are. The full diversity of DCP experiences deserves to be in this show. We hope that in the next season Karamo and Adam will broaden the narrative.
Parts of Me exists to expand representation of donor-conceived people across arts, media, and culture.
- Browse our DCP Stories Collection to discover existing authentic donor conceived representation
- Meet Donor-Conceived Creators whose works are shifting narratives
- Access our Media Guidance if you’re creating or reporting on donor conception
- Learn about Creator Fellowships (launching Year 2)
