The Medium and the Message

You certainly can binge listen to interview shows, as I had done while traveling on business recently, but shows doing creative audio fiction like “Welcome to Night Vale” (most recently ranked 65^th in Stitcher’s top 100 podcasts) and its spinoff, “Alice Isn't Dead,” are a better fit for this. They are, in effect, reviving what radio dramas used to do from the 1930s through 1950s, only with far less content constraints than that era.

If podcasting is truly going to become a binge medium, appealing to audiences who like shows like “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black” or “Transparent,” it will need more shows like those -- series that are more like audio theatre than audio books.

A cursory search finds plenty of podcast audio drama efforts in the sci-fi and horror genres, but few if any of those have become part of a broader cultural conversation like the true-crime podcast “Serial” has. “Night Vale” isn’t the only one out there, if you look for general interest audio theatre. “The Thrilling Adventure Hour,” “The Truth” and “Limetown” are bubbling up just behind “Night Vale,” as far as gaining notoriety and attention among those who already engaged podcast listeners, who like fictional audio theatre rather than any other type of podcast.

Is it even possible for podcasts like these to catch on and make an impact as binge-able entertainment – on the same scale that streaming TV series have? Is the format of audio podcast theatre too idiosyncratic and specialized, at least at this time, to have the same reach? Wired pointed out back in the fall that “The Message,” a fiction podcast backed by podcast advertising network Panoply [referred to in this entry], advertising giant BBDO and General Electric, as its sponsor, is significant because it is one of the first, if not the first, podcast whose creation was actually driven by corporate entities.

Podcasting began as a grass-roots medium, and one could say it still mostly is that, but is it possible – would some call it heresy? – to say that to have broader cultural impact and reach, it needs more shows like “The Message”? As it took the corporate engine and technological advance of Netflix streaming to bring binge watching (and specific series) into the general public consciousness, so it might be necessary to have an organized business with deeper pockets to muscle content into that consciousness.