It was almost 100 years ago that the first radio dramas hit the airwaves, beginning with A Comedy of Danger, written by then 23-year-old playwright Richard Hughes. Debuting on BBC radio in January 1924, Danger was set hundreds of feet below the Earth’s surface, in a pitch-black Welsh coalmine, making it ill-suited for the stage but a natural fit for audio. Broadcast out of the BBC’s London headquarters, Marconi House, it set off a wave of radio fiction – peaking with Orson Welles’ controversial broadcast The War of the Worlds and the BBC’s perennial radio soap The Archers – that wouldn’t taper off until the advent of color television.



Now, radio fiction is experiencing something of a renaissance on the shoulders of the podcast boom, which has spawned more than 525,000 active shows and, according to Apple, another 50bn episode downloads. The rising tide, however, has lifted some boats more than others. Where conversation-based podcasts and true-crime narratives have thrived, with dozens of them being adapted for the screen, audio fiction has been slower to rise, hampered by the innate constraints of audio-based platforms and television’s stranglehold on episodic fiction. But that hasn’t stopped podcast producers from trying to revive the radio drama as a form of contemporary prestige entertainment.

Gimlet Media, the podcasting startup based in Brooklyn, tapped the valve of radio drama in 2016 with Homecoming, the fictional thriller podcast brought to life by Catherine Keener, Oscar Isaac and David Schwimmer. Last month Gimlet released its second scripted fiction podcast, Sandra, whose titular Alexa-like virtual assistant is voiced by Kristen Wiig, with Alia Shawkat and Ethan Hawke co-starring. There’s also Tumanbay, the historical BBC period drama; The Black Tapes and Limetown, two investigative shows that borrow structurally from Serial; and Welcome to Night Vale, a kind of podcast turducken that presents as a radio show set in the fictional south-western town of Night Vale.

Just last week, John Cameron Mitchell announced his own spin on the radio drama with Anthem: Homunculus, an anthologized musical podcast set to feature Cynthia Erivo, Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, Ben Foster and Bridget Everett. Other upcoming releases include Gossip, a 12-part soap opera by bestselling author Allison Raskin, and Battleground, originally Hulu’s first television pilot, now the first series to put the podcast-to-screen pipeline in reverse. But even while the number of podcast dramas has mushroomed, branching into experimental fiction, soap operas and musicals, its practitioners admit that audio fiction presents unique challenges.

Sandra, a fiction podcast by Gimlet Media. Photograph: Publicity image

As John Dryden, the creator of BBC’s Tumanbay, told Filmmaker Magazine: “The struggle for fiction podcasts is that a vast majority of the audience is not listening in a concentrated way, like they would at home while watching a Netflix drama.” He added: “Successful podcasts need to reach audience that is not 100% ‘with it’ the whole time, who get distracted. And that’s a real challenge when you’re dealing with fiction.”

Hernan Lopez, the longtime Fox executive who in 2016 launched the podcast network Wondery with financial backing from 20th Century Fox, concurs. “I think fiction has a much higher bar to clear in audio because the number of characters that people can follow at any one time is smaller,” he tells the Guardian, estimating that listeners can keep pace with no more than six people in any one story. “If you’re an audio fiction writer, you have to be extremely disciplined, not only with how many characters you include but also how gradually you reveal them and make them distinct from one another in their personalities and their tone of voice.”

That might explain why podcast networks have siphoned film and television actors, unmoored from the Sarah Koenig-esque, public radio style of narration, away from the screen and toward audio.

In Homecoming, the television adaptation of which will star Julia Roberts and stream on Amazon, Keener and Schwimmer vary cadence and intonation to remarkable effect, a feat that’s even more impressive given that the show eschews narration and direct exposition of any kind. Creators Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz recorded the audio as if shooting a narrative film, moving outside when a conversation requires it and using complex sound design to cultivate the feeling of intimacy from which television programs benefit more easily.

Orson Welles in a CBS recording studio, as seen in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles. Photograph: PR Company Handout

In the parlance of podcast folk, “immersive” is the word often used to characterize this desired effect. “If you look at the Wondery originals, you’ll find they have in common the immersive storytelling style, this style that makes people feel they’re in the middle of the action,” says Lopez, whose production company currently boasts two fiction projects: The Cleansed, a postapocalyptic drama, and The Dark Tome, a series of stories that proceed from a magical book found in a derelict bookshop. “It’s very different from other traditional podcasts, most of them coming from the public radio style.”

Lopez believes that, even with the audio fiction boon, we’re more likely to see non-fiction podcasts being adapted as scripted television dramas, as is the case with Wondery’s biggest hit Dirty John, an investigative collaboration with the Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other podcasts like Gimlet’s StartUp and Reply All. Earlier this year, it was announced that Bravo TV optioned Dirty John for two seasons, with Connie Britton and Eric Bana starring in an anthologized, scripted take on the podcast.

“It’s a natural consequence of creating stories that resonate with people,” says Lopez. “We’re going to see a lot of audio fiction projects being optioned as television shows, but I don’t believe we’re going to see many shows that were originally developed for television make their way into podcasts. When the writer realizes how fundamentally different writing for audio is to writing for television, they very quickly realize that they almost have to conceive the show all over again.”

The biggest impediment faced by fictionalized podcasts isn’t their diminution at the hands of television, but the stories themselves being swept up by the screen. As Lopez explains: “Television networks are now seeing podcasts, like they did novels and comic books for many years before, as another source of ideas.”