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.