Like Falling Off a Pod

Radio has been depicted on screen for a long time. Take Death at Broadcasting House, a 1930s murder mystery based on a novel by BBC insider Val Gielgud, and featuring the terrifying Blattnerphone recorder as a crucial plot device. 

Broadcast TV is littered with fictional characters who work in radio, such as Frasier’s eponymous Dr. Frasier Crane, host of a call-in show on nonexistent KACL-AM. Several characters on the 1990s cult hit Northern Exposure had cameos or programs on the also nonexistent Alaska station KBHR. The 1970s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati gets a lot of love from former employees of AM Top-40 stations for its accuracy. And for a surreal rabbit-hole, check out NewsRadio, which features a young Joe Rogan.

Radio provides an ideal “situation” for the TV situation comedy (a form ironically, of course, invented by radio in the 1930s). Radio stations have hustle and bustle, high stakes, weirdos and above all, exotic equipment — especially the alluring microphone.  But more than a decade into podcasting, TV has not really figured out how to depict it. And that is a problem for those of us in audio production.

Certainly, I know scripted TV is not the place to search for realism — that most characters never use the bathroom or pick their noses or whatever. Most professions are likewise oversimplified and overdramatized for the small screen.

But imagine if, on all the popular TV emergency room dramas, the doctors and nurses used chunky toy stethoscopes instead of normal ones. And then in the real world, insurers and patients refused to pay emergency room bills, because after all, the Fisher Price Medical Kit is available on eBay for only $15. That’s sometimes what it feels like audio producers are up against, offering realistic budgets and trying to make a living in a world where we are usually portrayed as dopey amateurs. On TV, podcasting is the career choice of losers and obsessives, people who do senseless things yet achieve powerful results with just a few scraps of badly-used equipment (and usually, one guesses by deduction, inherited wealth). 

TV also seems to have settled on the correct number of people needed to produce a podcast: three, at maximum. With a few exceptions, all these people are on mic, and none do background support such as engineering, story editing, or mixing. The number of minutes these characters spend preparing for interviews, booking guests, or marketing? Generally speaking, zero. They barely spend a minute making their shows.

You could argue most of that back-end stuff is boring to depict. But Silicon Valley made coding funny. The Office made phone calls funny. Surely, Pro Tools crashing as a result of another iOS upgrade could be a great plot device. Studio outtakes? Unmuted tracks in the published .mp3? Don’t get me started. And there’s so much drama in those Google Doc script notes that the producer thought they deleted but then the host actually saw! Anyway, my point is, TV shows that successfully feature jobs at least make an effort to research the actual pain-points and joys of that profession.

OK, enough complaining. Instead, let’s see if there’s something we can learn, against the odds, from our TV avatars. How, given the production methods depicted on screen, might these fictional podcasts sound? And what could they (and by extension, perhaps we) do to improve production?

[Caveat: I might have missed some stuff, because do not have time watch every episode where these pod-characters appear and pretend to podcast — though you are welcome to help buy me more time.]

Now, please follow along with me as I give unsolicited consultations to TV’s biggest fake pods.

Your three hosts roam Manhattan waving your iPhones in the general direction of people being interviewed. Two of your hosts insist on recording themselves only in voice memos, but one host likes to use a stand-up microphone with a script, ensuring a very inconsistent sound. The scripts themselves are pretty decent, so that does make up for the total lack of continuity. If you had a mix engineer, maybe you could address your self-inflicted field-tape issues, but you don’t — no one appears to edit, mix, master or upload your true-crime show. At least you have an awareness of the marketplace, thanks to mean-girl competitor Tina Fey. But then she dies, just like everyone else around you, in service of the plot. I would recommend adding a few media defense lawyers to your team.

You’re a podcaster in real life, the Marc Maron who just ended his conversational show WTF’s long run. So your cramped garage studio is road-tested and realistic. Your mics are quality, the setting intimate and sound-baffled with clutter. You are an agent of chaos, yet you monitor your own levels on a laptop as you record. However, you appear to have killed off your real-life producer. Maybe your cats do that job? I notice that the IMDb production credits for Maron number in the hundreds. Perhaps the TV simulacrum-Marc could afford an operational sidekick.

Your host is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who lives in an enormous old Bay Area house that has never caught on fire. To your credit, you have a producer and a mixing board in your home studio (and also, of course, a murder board!). You and the producer both wear headphones to monitor levels when you record (extra props for the pop filter), and you appear to use viable, multi-track software for mixing. You voice your narration beautifully (because you are Octavia Spencer), but you keep your script in a three-ring binder on the table beneath you. That will create a lot of extra noise when you turn the page. Not to mention, you’re looking down and constricting your vocal tract. Overall — and I know this is a big ask since you ceased to exist after three seasons — I’d recommend hiring an editor, fact-checker and lawyer to review the cold cases you’re re-opening in the service of having endless family and marital dramas.

You have a lot going with your production team: an angry Irish investigative newspaper reporter who actually has an editor, and an assistant producer who carries around research in a binder (are binders are making one last stand in TV podcasts?) and who even wears headphones in the field at times. Your would-be host, however, does a lot of stand-up narration without headphones, often while pacing. Finally he does the whole “narrating atop a wind-swept bridge into a Zoom H1 without a windscreen, probably because it would confuse viewers with its Muppet-like hairiness” move. But then he throws it all away. Overall: this works for me! Also, Bodkin pod(kin), check out my newsletter bestie Samantha Hodder’s assessment of your moves here.

You’re Bro Hartman, a bro whose podcast emanates, starting in Season 4, from a network skyscraper in New York City. Due to your proximity to the dying embers of daytime broadcast TV — which apparently features endless meltdowns, on-camera defections, sudden resignations, and near plane-crashes — your podcast must also match the high-pressure, live environment. Therefore, it is in fact what we used to call in the business “a broadcast.” Your engineer only pops his head out of the control room during ad breaks to shout stuff like “twenty seconds!” — just like real TV directors do. Unlike TV anchors, however, Bro don’t need a teleprompter or any notes, because he is a podcaster. You and your sidekick effortlessly fill the hours with spontaneous “banter” that your audience considers appointment viewing for mysterious reasons. When you are off the air, you do not prepare for the next day’s show, but rather sit around loudly sipping juice boxes and making sexy eyes at female network bosses. Great work if you can get it, which no one can, because this job does not exist.

You and your sister record your wildly popular, real-talk sex-empowerment chat show in various extremely large LA kitchens and living rooms. You sit together, headphone-free, and wave around hand-held microphones with abandon. Did you know there’s a reason why you never see podcasts recording with hand-held mics? Nonetheless, when your rom-com Rabbi boyfriend listens to the show on his laptop, the audio is perfect! Amazing how you pull that off since (I am tired now) you have no producer or sound engineer. At least you have a business manager who gets you ad revenue and pursues acquisition. As this manager frets that your sisterly drama will blow up an acquisition meeting with Spotify (ha ha), she sighs and then offers the only self-aware statement I’ve heard during all my weary travels through this mirror podcast world: 

“Oh my God. I’m gonna have to sell my eggs.”