The first time that I pressed play on a podcast, it was 2007 and I had just spent half an hour working out how to download the mp3 file. Hearing the hosts’ voices coming out of my headphones was a thrill. This was a new audio medium where in theory anybody could bypass the traditional media gatekeepers at places like BBC Radio 4 or NPR and find success.
Years later, in autumn 2014, I was one of millions of people tuning in to Serial, the account of the producers’ investigation into the 1999 murder of Korean-American teenager Hae Min Lee that quickly became a global phenomenon. Its on-air reconstructions of Lee’s disappearance and its unpacking of contradictory alibis and motives gripped me. The smooth voice of host Sarah Koenig became so influential that it can be heard replicated everywhere today across the true crime podcast genre.
Years on from the release of Serial, I pressed play on the first episode of the new television show Only Murders in the Building. It stars the unlikely trio of Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as residents of a fancy pre-Second World War apartment block on the Upper West Side in Manhattan who team up to solve a murder after a body is found in their building. They meet, however, because of a podcast. On the night of the crime, the three are separately settling down to enjoy the latest episode of their favourite show, All is Not OK in Oklahoma, hosted by the “queen of true crime” Cinda Canning. The building is then evacuated. Desperate for some peace and a reliable internet connection to enjoy the show, the characters band together in a local restaurant to listen.
When the nature of the disruption in their building becomes clear, therefore, it is natural that these true crime podcast obsessives would want to start their own show about it. It’s the perfect excuse for them to turn amateur sleuth, sneaking around with microphones and covertly interviewing their neighbours. They each come to it with different motivations: Martin’s washed-up TV actor Charles-Haden Savage sees it as a chance to get back in the limelight, Short’s out of work Broadway director Oliver Putnam senses an opportunity to make some serious cash, and Gomez’s Mabel Mora is seemingly the only one who cares about what happened to the victim.
Only Murders in the Building is a passable mystery series with some gorgeous sets and costumes. It is most interesting, though, as the latest and arguably most successful attempt to date to translate the wild popularity of podcasts onto the screen. References to this audio-only medium are layered into every aspect of the series, from the regular use of voiceover to narrate what the characters are doing to the score, which very deliberately mimics the style of music ubiquitous in true crime podcasts.
For those who have tried to make a podcast themselves (a popular lockdown activity), there are plenty of pleasingly jokey references to the process, too. Martin’s character swelters as he records his narration in a makeshift studio in a walk-in wardrobe. Much of the comic dynamic he has with Short comes from the latter’s regular insistence that they “retake” especially meaningful or touching conversations so they can capture a better version.
In one memorable scene, the trio actually get to meet their podcasting hero, Cinda Canning, who is played in a sparkling cameo by Tina Fey (she has Sarah Koenig’s “podcast voice” down pat). She takes a call part way through their meeting and confirms that she has just sold her podcast company for $30 million, in a reference to the rush of acquisitions in the real-life podcast industry in the last two years. The closer you look, the more meta it becomes: Canning’s blockbuster podcast All is Not OK in Oklahoma is clearly a parody of Serial, and Serial Productions itself was acquired by the New York Times in July 2020 in a deal reportedly worth $25 million.
Transforming the podcast industry
While watching Only Murders in the Building, I wondered how many of the inside podcast jokes would land with the TV audience. But as the series went on, I remembered that over 100 million people listened to the first series of Serial, and many more have since followed one of the numerous true crime podcasts that launched in its wake. In 2007, making or consuming podcasts was a very niche activity. Now, it’s just another form of mass media.
The lure of television has been a big part of the podcast industry’s transformation. Insiders have been talking up the potential of the so-called “podcast-to-TV pipeline” for some time now, and in the last five years Hollywood studios and streaming giants alike have woken up to the fact that there is a lot of valuable intellectual property, ripe for adaptation, in the audio sphere. After more than a decade of being reliant on changeable advertising revenue, acquisition and rights sales now offer a select few podcasters with a large enough audience alternative, and highly lucrative, revenue streams.
All of this has resulted in a kind of podcasting gold rush, prompting a series of high-profile acquisitions as major television and audio companies compete to stake the biggest claim in the space. The audio streaming platform Spotify has made a string of such purchases, scooping up the Gimlet network – known for such narrative podcasts as Reply All and Crimetown – in February 2019 for a reported $200 million, followed by true crime production studio Parcast for $56 million. Subsequent deals have included the $100 million paid to libertarian superstar Joe Rogan in May 2020 to make his podcast exclusive to the Spotify platform.
The problem is that all of this money and talk about the vast potential of adapting podcasts for television has yet to produce a single really good TV series. The closest contender is Homecoming, an Amazon drama that debuted in 2018, based on the fiction podcast of the same name. A serviceable but not exceptional thriller, it was the casting of Julia Roberts in her first ever small screen role that occupied most of the critics’ attention. Even then, this series stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Adapting the true crime genre
It would be best, meanwhile, not to dwell on the low point represented by Alex, Inc., which premiered the same year as Homecoming. It was an adaptation of the Gimlet podcast Startup, a non-fiction series that chronicled the podcast company’s founding, starring Zach Braff as a radio journalist who quit his job to start a podcast company. It was cancelled after two months, although the highly memeable images of Braff holding microphones wrongly will never be forgotten.
The true crime podcast genre has been particularly attractive to would-be television adaptors, given its built-in narrative appeal and vast audience, but has similarly failed to generate any real hits. Pulpy, gruesome audio series like Dirty John and The Shrink Next Door have both made it to the small screen, but failed to make much of an impact in this era of non-stop prestige TV. Non-fiction has fared better, with documentary makers picking up where the Serial team and others have left off, but that genre lacks the astronomical commercial returns possible with a drama or comedy.
By contrast, Only Murders in the Building seems to represent a new departure for podcasts on screen. Although not an adaptation of any one audio series, the TV show is so steeped in the form that it is impossible to separate the two. The writers managed to integrate true crime podcast tropes and references without sacrificing the appeal of the main story, and in doing so have created something with the “What will happen next?” appeal of Serial without exploiting a real tragedy or playing a death for laughs.
Seeing Martin, Short and Gomez tune into their favourite podcast on screen felt familiar, reminding me of all the times I’ve waited eagerly for a new episode to drop. Podcasting is part of those characters’ lives, just as it is for millions of us.
This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
