Currently, the hottest production house in the TV business – the company that produces the most talked-about shows and the place that has the streaming giants fighting tooth and bank balance over its projects – is one that doesn’t produce anything for people to actually watch.
Specifically, Wondery is an ear-based business: a podcast company, founded just five years ago, which has become the epicentre of a new content gold rush. The streaming platforms, having gnawed comic book IP to the bone and rebooted the reboot of everything they could find, have scented fresh meat.
Presently, it’s estimated that up to 20 of Wondery’s hit podcasts – which includes the likes of Dr Death, about a real-life neurosurgeon who mutilated his patients, and Dirty John, about a real-life con artist who bilked his partners – are in production. Those two have already been made: Dr Death, starring Joshua Jackson, Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin, aired on StarzPlay in September, while Dirty John, starring Eric Bana and Connie Britton, was such a Netflix hit in 2018 that it returned for a second series last year.
The latter sums up just why the rush to adapt podcasts for the screen is being described by industry insiders as a feeding frenzy. The first series, hosted by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Goffard, followed the podcast in focusing on con man John Meehan’s abusive relationship with Debra Newell, whom he met on a dating website. But it was such a smash that they brought it back with an entirely different story, calling it Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story, despite the new con man in question no longer being called John.
But here’s the point: it’s not simply that these podcast adaptations are mining hitherto untapped stories, they’re uncovering hitherto untapped genres. In this case: the con artist anti-romcom. And it was thanks to the podcast’s success in the first place – it was downloaded more than ten million times within the first six weeks of release – that anyone even knew such a thing existed.
You only need to look at the latest project from the Wondery production line to realise the impact podcasts are now having on TV. The Shrink Next Door, a hit Wondery podcast that told the story of Dr Isaac Herschkopt, a psychiatrist who exploited his patients, is set to arrive on Apple TV+ this month. Paul Rudd and Will Ferrell signed on to play the lead roles – Rudd as Herschkopt and Ferrell as his patient – without having even seen a script. They were simply fans of the podcast. The fact that it had been the No1 podcast for three straight weeks on Apple’s podcast charts likely didn’t hurt either (nor, indeed, for Apple itself to commission it).
But the path from pod to screen has not always been so simple. The number of podcasts in various stages of TV show development may currently be estimated to be well in the hundreds, but there have been some stinkers along the way.
Fictional scripted podcasts, notably, have been curiously hard to replicate on TV. For every Homecoming on Amazon Prime – the first genuine breakout podshow, which starred Julia Roberts and was based on a podcast that told its tale of semi sci-fi conspiracy via the medium of phone calls and therapy sessions – there are countless flops.
Podcasts that tell a different story each week – such as Lore, which offers up tall tales of supernatural folklore – have bombed on screen. Podcasts about podcasters themselves – including Limetown, about a fictional NPR reporter uncovering the mystery surrounding a research facility in Tennessee – have not seen people clicking play. (The fact the latter, starring Jessica Biel, aired on Facebook Watch likely didn’t help either, as it proved to be the one cache of data Facebook managed to keep almost entirely private.) The less said about the podcast StartUp – Gimlet Media’s pod about businesses at their early stages, which told the story of Gimlet Media itself and spawned a show that starred Zach Braff – the better.
Some of the best podcasts have simply proved unadaptable. The first mega-hit series of Serial, which investigated the potential innocence of convicted murderer Adnan Syed and made host Sarah Koenig a minor celebrity, has proved too knotty and open-ended for TV. The Oscar-winning director of Spotlight, Tom McCarthy, has kicked the tyres on the idea of adapting S-Town – podcasting’s one true masterpiece, a novel in real-life audio form – without any progress being made.
But make no mistake: we are now living in a podcast world. For proof, look at how podcasts themselves have become the stars of the show. The best, warmest, funniest show currently on TV is Only Murders In The Building on Disney+, in which Steve Martin, Martin Shaw and Selena Gomez play true crime podcast-obsessed neighbours who start their own pod when someone is found dead in their apartment building. After just four episodes had aired, news came that it had already been renewed for a second series.
NOW READ
Jesse Plemons: ‘I’ve noticed fewer people refer to me as Meth Damon…’