Happy #AudioDramaSunday & Mother’s Day!

Damn pals, I’m gonna be completely honest with you: I am zonked this week. Not only did I get to see my friends from college in Sheer Mag play the penultimate gig of their tour in support of their great new record Playing Favorites, I also saw Say Anything celebrate 20 years of Is a Real Boy, and played a show of my own with my boys in Ghost Tour last night! I didn’t get home until just before 2 AM, so I’m running on empty right now, but I also listened to a bunch of shows this week and had a chance to speak with my pal KC Wayland who just celebrated 15 years of We’re Alive. More on that below. In the meantime, enjoy this photo of me screaming my head off while wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt that has the same fabric pattern as my bedsheets from the 90’s:

Today we’re doing a small brunch for my mother in law, Sharon, and sister in law, Jill, with bagels and fruit and cake. I’m very lucky to have had them both in my life for the past decade and it’s always a good reason to celebrate them. While I won’t be able to see my own incredible mom, Barb, I’m happy to know she’ll be visiting in a few short weeks so that we can catch Hadestown on Broadway just days before her birthday! I love her so much. She’s literally the best. Here we are as babies:

But, again, this is a podcast newsletter. Let’s talk some podcasts:

Camlann

God damn, what a finale. This show has been a consistent highlight for me since it premiered, with each release folding in new lore and helping us to fall in even more in love with this cast of survivors than we already were from the beginning. The final, striking image, of hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of other fires burning throughout the wastes, giving light to the darkness and promising so many more incredible stories and characters archetypes for when this show inevitably returns for season two. Please go listen. They need all the love they can get to make sure this merry band continues to thrive in a hopeless place. I NEED IT!

Breaker Whiskey

What a difference having other people around makes. No, we still don’t get to hear from anyone besides our intrepid trucker in this week’s transmissions, but someone is there. And the absolute lightness and joy that Lauren Shippen is able to access in these moments is transcendent. I’d been wondering if there’d be any chance that we would actually get to hear from Don (or eventually Harry), but this choice seems so much smarter to me. The show hasn’t broken open the floodgates—yet—and instead allows us to just experience the joy that Whiskey feels from no longer being alone after all this time as she tells the empty world about their meeting. It’s beautiful stuff.

World Gone Wrong

I swear to god, Audacious Machine Creative made this episode just for me. Whenever anyone in my life has to go to the bathroom, I make the joke that they need to be careful, and on the lookout for toilet snakes. It is an incredibly dumb joke, and a bit I’ve been committed to for years. But now I’m going to have to level up my game and tell people to look out for the toilet gators! But in all seriousness, the idea of subterranean gators who have created an entire new system of tunnels under the city of Chicago is so fun, and a perfect example of why I love this show. The format allows for so much play, while remaining squarely anchored between two characters that have nothing but love for one another, despite the insane shit they have to put up with just by continuing to exist in the world.

Give Me Away

Noa is finally at Red Camp and Lauren Shippen is now squarely rooted among the rest of our cast of doubles. Her character brings a media savvy perspective that has plenty of notes on the way that Brooke/Dierdre have been running The Nevada Project, and ideas for ways to rebrand in a way that could maybe allow for future increased freedom for the ex residents of The Ghost House. We also see the train wreck that is Nat Cassidy’s Travis make the totally sound and in no way reactionary decision to apply. And then that ending? Once he’s been introduced to his Second (and his [REDACTED])? chef’s kiss

Midst

Isn’t it funny how, in a show like this one, the endgame always reveals itself in such a way that events from the very beginning of the series finally come into focus? Some shaky alliances are made here as the true culprits and method for the destruction of Midst’s Moon from episode one are revealed. Unfortunately, our erstwhile heroes’ plan to destroy the bank where the Trust stores every citizen’s history of Valor is also revealed, at least partially, to one of the people who could go ahead and throw a wrench in it. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that a lot of things are going to go the way sideways between now and the series finale in just a few weeks. And I absolutely cannot wait to see what we go through to get there.

Dead Space: Deep Cover

I’ve been so hyped for this show ever since Pacific Obadiah first announced it as part of Bloody FM’s upcoming slate. While I didn’t have a chance to play the remaster that only recently came out, these games were huge for me in high school, so the idea of exploring their world through the realm of fiction podcasting seemed like a no brainer. To top that all off, they got Jordan Cobb, the Queen Mother of all sci-fi horror audio drama, to play undercover journalist Emmeline Ayuba, who must infiltrate the shady Unitologist Church in order to discover just how powerful they really are, and maybe find her missing sister in the process. I cannot wait to see how the whole thing pans out.

The Missed Lives of Max & Judy

Written and created by Janina Matthewson of Within the Wires, with direction, sound design, and an original score by Jonathan Mitchell of The Truth, there was no world that this show wasn’t going to be one of the best things that I’ve heard in a while. And boy let me tell you, it does not disappoint. A sci-fi rom com in the vein of the fantastic About Time, Max and Judy are two friends for whom love should have been a no brainer, if they (and their other romantic partners) didn’t keep getting in the way of their happiness. With a spunky trickster narrator who wants for nothing more than these two to fall in love, who pulls some shenanigans to force them to fast forward through fifty years of their lives to see what it’d be like if they didn’t have one another, this show is full of heart and catharsis. Please listen. It was so freaking good I can’t contain myself.

Sorry About the Murder

Drew Frohmann and the team behind Human-B-Gon have a new series coming out and I was lucky enough to get a chance to listen to the first two episodes. This show is so aggressively Canadian (I mean, it’s right there in the title) in a way that makes it immediately charming, even if the subject matter is, well, murder-y. The performances are fantastic, the production is slick, and I’m already looking like Charlie Day in that one episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia trying to figure it out. Stoked to listen along to the rest as it airs!

We’re Alive: Scout’s Honor

Before we get to our spotlight interview with series creator KC Wayland, I’d be remiss not to mention the fantastic way that this new miniseries wrapped up. The kids enact their plan to distract the encroaching hoard of infected while they get Zack’s parents’ yacht up and running for their escape to the mainland was incredibly fraught and cathartic to listen to. The episode wasn’t without its heartbreak, but it was so gratifying to see the crew use their scout skills and the deep partnership they’ve developed in order to escape (mostly) unscathed. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, especially now that we’ve got to wait a while for We’re Alive: Descendants season two. But as I mentioned above, this team has just hit 15 years creating in this medium, in the same world, and that is something to celebrate, so:

Congratulations on 15 years of We're Alive. That's such a wild milestone to hit in a medium like ours. How long ago did you first come up with the story for Scout's Honor? And did you always plan on it being a crowdfunding stretch goal for the final seasons of Descendants?

Thank you! It’s weird to think how long this ride has been. Still going, just a bit longer :)

Ok, so I think I should state “Slight SPOILERS” right off the bat on this one as there’s a bit of a plant in the original series that was the start of it all, back in 2010. In the second season of We’re Alive, one of the episodes explored the coastline of California. While there they encounter a yacht that’s disabled and unanchored. Whenever the survivors encountered these sorts of discoveries, I always tried to backfill the idea with the reasons why it was there. From there, the idea kept brewing for a long time. It was one of those pieces of the puzzle that I had a good idea of what I wanted to do, but just didn’t have the time to develop it further until much later on. 

Fast forward to 2016… I was asked to put together a few other concept pitch packages for various projects involving We’re Alive. The “Tales of We’re Alive” was something that I wanted to do while I was developing Descendants. The continuation of the main series was something that I knew was going to take a long time to mentally develop and plot out, so in the meantime I could develop some of the smaller stories of the world that would end up being setups for the bigger stories later. Lockdown was the first one, Scout’s Honor was the 2nd, and Goldrush was the third. Scouts was going to take a long time, I knew this right off the bat, as I needed to do a LOT of research on the island. The big blocks of the story I knew already, I figured out early on that I wanted to do a kid-centered story, and that it would take place on Catalina. When I was younger I had spent a lot of time in Emerald Bay as a Boy Scout, and so I knew I wanted to incorporate that experience. The rest of the island, however, was a bit of a mystery. 

So, in 2017 I set off to the island with a sound-designer, co-writer, and a friend/CTO of WP. We explored the entire island, and traced the steps of the Scouts, picking up ideas along the way, researching and asking questions so that the island would become an integral part of the story, and it all fit organically. A lot of this research and development was done before Goldrush, so that I would be able to keep developing the story, work with the co-writer on it, so that we wouldn’t have to wait too long between the releases of the stories. Well… it sort of stalled there a bit in development, so I ended up bringing on a different Co-Writer, Elisa Eliot, and together we were able to put everything together to finally record the kids in 2021. 

When working on the financial plan for the future seasons of We’re Alive Descendants, I realized that we were going to need a fairly large amount of money to be able to fully create the rest of the series. The first season of Descendants alone is 14 hours long, and costly from just a labor perspective. Part of the reason it took so long to complete Scout’s Honor was because of funding sources changing, and having to come up with new strategies. In the end, it took another external project to die in development to be able to fully execute the finishing of the series. When discussing Kickstarter strategies, there was a lot of discussion of how to frame everything. Would we have Scout’s as part of the main goals, or as a side-thing? It took a lot of consideration, and eventually, we came to a decision that releasing along with the campaign would be best, that way we could capture attention back to the series with new content, along with pushing for funding for the rest. It was a bit unconventional, but worked in the end I think. The timing was great as the finale lined up perfectly with our 15th Anniversary.

One of the things that was really fun for me, as a longtime listener following along with Scout's Honor, was going back to the very beginning of the outbreak and learning new things about the ways in which the infected were already evolving to have different traits. Were there any new revelations that you were particularly proud of as you were developing this story?

For me one of the hardest parts of the other series was how to include kids. There’s an added level of complexity, and while I did it partially in the past, I wanted to be able to cover an area and perspective that presented a big challenge. That aspect I’m relatively proud of. There’s a few little details along the way in this story that do reveal a couple new aspects of the infection that we may not have seen before that may lead into other reveals in the story later on. The great thing about these side stories is how much they can plant the seeds to grow into something bigger later on.

A lot of people say to never work with kids or animals, and yet you anchored an entire show around a cast playing pre-teens, and personally I think they all knocked it out of the park. What advice do you have for other creators looking to write for, work with, and direct younger actors?

Kids are mostly only difficult to work with because of the logistical limitations of the recording process. Having to have parents there, dealing with work-permits, Coogan accounts, scheduling and working around school… all these aspects present hurdles that most productions can’t deal with. BUT, once you get past all those things, Kids can be some of the greatest performers to work with because they often have the most vivid imaginations. Adults stop playing pretend, so having kids visualize and see things can be a bit easier. How you communicate changes too- my entire directorial style had to shift in how I coached them through scenes. 

If I were to give advice, I would say that having a lot of hours directing already does help, so you can learn how to listen carefully and find ways to inspire the performances needed to have the scenes come alive. Secondly, casting is more than half the job of directing. Callbacks are essential to see how an actor responds and shifts in a scene, and that would allow us to see how the kids responded and adjusted. Performing in front of a microphone is VERY intimidating for actors, especially kids. My first gig acting was as a kid actor in front of a mic at 16, and I was so nervous that I completely lost my breath when stepping up to the mic. Keeping all that in mind, I wanted to create an environment that supported these young talents, so they felt free and uninhibited in the booth. One of the last pieces of advice I could give, is record in order of the series. Steven Speilberg did that in ET for the kids, so their emotional journey could be understood more easily, and I copied that model.

Now that this series is in the can, all we have left are the two final seasons of Descendants. Can you give us any hints for what's in store when we return to the future of this world? Is there any chance we follow up with any of the Scouts, like the way that new characters from Goldrush eventually found their way into the main series?

Well, we are on our way into recording season 2, and I’m writing season 3 now, and I can say that the perspectives of the world are going to change. There’s areas of the world that I haven’t been able to explore in this way, until now. Answers that have long been awaited get to finally be revealed. Is Scouts a setup for future pieces of Descendants? Yes… maybe not right away, but there’s definitely a tie-in for future episodes.

BONUS SNACK

I have wanted to watch My Dinner With Andre since first seeing the Critical Film Studies episode of Community all the way back in college. And yet, I could never quite convince myself to pop on a two hour movie of two friends talking in a single location… until this week, when that was exactly the kind of vibe that Sam and I were in. This movie is fantastic, as we spend time with two theater artists with contrasting views on just about everything, even if they both have an avowed love of art and art-making. One of the things that struck me was that both Wally and Andre look at each other like they have the more naive viewpoint about the world, even though they’re fundamentally pretty similar human beings. They’re both sensitive types with their heads in the clouds and, at least in a certain way, pretty oblivious to the people and world around them, despite how smart and deep they’re both convinced they are. Totally made our Criterion Channel subscription worth it, and (obviously) made that original Community episode make all the more sense.

That’s all for this week, and boy, what a doozy it was. I’ll see y’all back here next week, with a slightly shorter queue, and a hunger for new shows. Talk soon! ❤️