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- Bobby's Snacks Vol. 45: Jump to a Commercial & Skip the Whole Thing
Bobby's Snacks Vol. 45: Jump to a Commercial & Skip the Whole Thing
Bob Raymonda
January 18, 2026
Happy #AudioDramaSunday y’all!
Can’t believe it’s already almost February. My kid’s eight months old. She can pull herself to standing with one hand. She claps. She waves. Her top two teeth are FINALLY beginning to poke out after weeks of pulling at her ear and chewing on everything in sight. Right now, I feel like I’m beginning to emerge from a chrysalis that I’d put myself in, getting the wind to finally interact with more of my own creativity, now that we have things down to a bit more of a recognizable routine. I’ve even had not one, not two, but three meetings about some scripts I’m guest writing for release this year for a few podcasts that I truly adore. It feels good.
Which, frankly, is a miracle right now. Every day the algorithm is a new fresh hell to feast my eyes upon. My wife and I even signed up for one of those services that pays you pennies for how far you get in dumb branded mobile apps. It’s taken me a little over a week to hit $25 (the minimum for your first payout), which doesn’t feel worth it at all, but has at least reduced my doom scrolling by 85% because I’m too busy playing Disney Solitaire and Palmon Survival (a very dumb farming simulator slash Pokemon rip-off).
As always, my brain’s moving a million miles a minute with new project ideas even though I still have to finish the ones I’ve already started. Lord knows how many of them will ever see the light of day. But I’m just glad to know that my spark hasn’t went out in the time I took away from this part of my life. Because if I didn’t actively carve out time to make art with my friends, I wouldn’t know what to do with what little free time I have other than spiral away into abject oblivion.
But enough about me: let us Audio Drama.
It’s funny that I say that, because I actually can’t talk about this one without talking more about me. I purposefully held off pressing play on this show, not because I didn’t think new work by the Dead Signals team would be anything but brilliant, but because I have my own unfinished project called Seven Little Ghosts, originally envisioned as a micro-fiction show in 2020, before being abandoned and resurrected in late 2024 as a submission for last year’s Tribeca Audio Storytelling competition as a potential new weekly series. We weren’t selected, and even though I have a few more scripts in the tank, having a kid put it all the way back on the furthest end of the back burner. So when I saw this show was just that: a weekly show about someone communing with ghosts, it reminded me of a project I never fully saw through.
That being said: I’m trying to be gentler with myself. This show’s very existence doesn’t mean that I can’t return to (and eventually release) my own idea. Lord knows how many shows I’ve covered about Dracula. And the spin that Marc Sollinger and Dan Powell took the concept? It’s completely different than mine: following a cemetery employee in New York City whose job is to help the spirits still lingering figure out what unresolved things are keeping them from entering through that Onyx Door and passing onto the next thing, whatever that may be. It’s so deeply rooted in a single place, and plays with the history of NYC in such wonderful ways, like throwing back to stories about club kids and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and Tammany Hill Politicians. It’s brilliant. And I’m so happy to finally have gotten past my own insecurities and gotten all the way caught up. My particular favorite episode was The Folk Song Archivist.
Starstrider Productions’ adaptation of Dracula sends the count to the new millennium and breathes entirely new life into the property. Getting moments like The Demeter being a freight ship, or where Mina recounts getting to see Mean Girls in theaters when it was released, are an absolute delight. And that theme song? It sends me back to my Buffy the Vampire Slayer slash Angel-loving teenage self all over again. It’s got those nu-metal vibes of the early aughts down pat, with all the pastoral terror left in tact. Plus, that cast? All heavy hitters like Tom Crowley, Michelle Kelley, Anusia Buttersby, David Ault, and so many more. Bravo all the way around on this one. Definitely tune in if you haven’t had a chance to yet.
Good lord, that’s a wrap on season 5: a literal millennia spanning jaunt through the history of our titular death faking agency, and the two men at its center. And what a triumphant way to do so. Seeing Alvina snap into action: brainstorming her own ideas on how to fake The Interviewer’s next death, in order to keep the story going? It warmed my heart up like nobody’s business. I’m so curious to see where season 6 will take us, and what the company will look like after a cliffhanger like that one. But I’m confident, no matter which way this team goes, it will be a wild ride for everyone involved. I am so deliriously happy to have played a small part in this season, and so hearing Joan’s reference in the two-part finale made me feel so proud to have helped weave this beautiful tapestry. This team has earned a well deserved rest… though I hope it won’t be too long. Because as always, I’m chomping at the bit for more.
It wouldn’t be January if we hadn’t gotten another update from the immortal illusionists at the center of Atypical Artists’ annual audio drama project. Things are looking a bit different for Chambers and Fogg, who are still living on opposite sides of the country, gathering together and comparing notes on what it’s like to keep on going after everyone around you is gone. One is a movie producer, while the other is considering enlisting in the military during what we all know as World War II. It’s filled with all the unspoken yearning you’d come to expect from Lauren Shippen characters played by Briggon Snow and Andrew Nowak. It just rules? Okay? More things like this, that exist as a temporary flash in the pan, rather than an endless marathon to try to keep up with.
Christ, KC Wayland and team have really turned up the heat on this one. Those last few episodes were bleak and brutal in a way that I didn’t expect. Obviously it’s a story of surviving a zombie apocalypse, so there’s always been an undercurrent of danger and violence, and yet, through all the years I’ve been listening I’ve never felt as hopeless as I do now. What we’re witnessing (without any major spoilers) is a true passing of the baton from the old guard to the new. Because while this series has always been about the new generation of survivors… those tethers back to the original series were always there on the periphery, keeping us attached to what we know as this show. But the further we get away from that beginning, and the closer we get to the end, the less of those tethers stick around. And every single time another one is snatched away? It hurts. So deliciously bad.
You know, I shouldn’t be surprised that this show is making arcs inspired by the titular heroes’ extended family, but both Nightwing: Year One and Oracle: Year One were two of my favorite batches of episodes they’ve released yet. First and foremost, because casting Will Friedle (who will always be my Batman Beyond) as Nightwing is a stroke of genius, but also because it lets us see the world of Gotham beyond that cowl. I’ve already loved what Shelby Young was doing as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, but seeing her in the aftermath of The Killing Joke, becoming the woman on the computer? Getting to see both of these characters become people who are entirely separate from their previous mentor? And still fighting to make the city a better place? chef’s kiss
Every episode of this show gives me even more chills than the last. It’s just that good. Myle Yan Tay’s take on Ram is biting and earnest, even when he’s plumbing the very depths of his own soul to figure out why violence and retribution seem to be the only path forward he has in a world as unjust as this one. It’s dark. It’s frankly sickening, at certain points, and yet there’s this simmering undercurrent of humanity crackling at its edges every single second. The moment in Friday’s episode, where Kass has the courage to admit she kind of misses her father, as repugnant and vile as he was? It got me at my very core. It’s so deeply unsettling to realize that sometimes the people who can bring us the most harm can also bring us the most joy, in the weirdest way. So, so, so good. DEVOUR THIS!
This dropped RIGHT after my last update, so I couldn’t rave about it during the holiday season. But my god: setting the midseason finale up to be right on Christmas was a fantastic trick by Gabriel Urbina and team. I want nothing more than for it to be Valentine’s Day, so I can be smashing it into my queue, but am also glad they gave us some time to savor all of those juicy, shattering updates that we got alongside our cookies and egg nog. I wanted nothing more than for these two idiots to just KISS ALREADY, but nope, that wasn’t in the cards. Not when there were so many other pressing meetings and encounters that they were both destined to have instead. Lauren Grace Thompson and Andrés Enriquez continue to be an actual factual revelation together. Please give me six seasons and a movie.
I still have a few stray episodes to catch of this one, but when I saw they dropped a new one last week I had to dive straight into it. Especially with a name like The Donner Party: it was too immediately evocative for me not to. What followed was a complete head trip through an evening dinner party with some altogether unsettling implications. The cast on this one, as always, was fantastic, but I have to shoutout to my forever-collaborator Josh Rubino for voicing the titular party host. The man knows how to warp his voice in such a way that it sends the teeny tiny ghosts of spiders crawling down your spine, tingling your hair like nobody’s business. And then when I got to the credits and realized it was written by none other than the incredible author Kelly Link? Masterful stuff all the way around.
I’ll wrap things up this month with an update from Texarkana, NY: Forgive Me! will return in Summer 2026. There was once a world where we kid ourselves into thinking this would premiere last fall; but with my brother, Adam Raymonda, teaching his first year as a sound design professor at Syracuse University AND wrapping up season two of Windfall, Sam Twardy and I raising our kid, and Jack Marone and his wife expecting baby number two literally any day now, it wasn’t in the cards. That being said, we have been steadily chipping away at production in the time since our crowdfunding campaign last spring. And I finally got started on editing together some episodes in the last week, and I am so pleased with what we’ve got in store for you. It’s going to be a very special season, I think, and includes some of the best Fathers Ben & Klem writing we’ve ever seen. I’ll leave you with a little teaser shared on my Blusky last week, which has my favorite cut to mid-roll sequence ever:
FR. BEN: Damnit! I thought we had it!
FR. KLEM: That’s on us. We should’ve seen it coming.
FR. BEN: You wouldn’t have done the dishes anyway.
FR. KLEM: We’ll never know!
FR. BEN: Nope, and now we have to sit through this deeply offensive speech.
FR. KLEM: Moments like this Benji, don’t you wish you could jump to a commercial and skip the whole thing?
BONUS SNACK
Look, I was already a huge sucker for Slow Horses, so when I realized the producers had a new show (also on Apple TV) about a private investigator and an art restorer begrudgingly teaming up to look into the mystery of a bombing in the restorer’s neighborhood, I was sold immediately. Couple that with the fact that those two characters are played by a perfectly-cast Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson? And I’m going to (and did) devour the entire thing in as few sittings as possible. It was a pulse-pounding, funny, and terrifying thriller that had me on the edge of my seat. So glad that this one is getting a second season of chaos.