Indie Spotlight: Three Series That Demand Your Attention (And Also Shape This Industry For The Better) [updated version]
Why Happy Forgetting, Phonograph and the Telepathy Tapes have renewed my energy for this industry, and the important lessons they taught me this week
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Dear Reader… after publishing this newsletter last week, some serious concerns were brought to my attention about The Telepathy Tapes. While I review this information further, please read this last portion of this post with skepticism. At this point, (January 27, 20205), I have chosen not to edit my original piece, although I may change my mind about this in the future.
For now, I see it as an important artifact of how I thought about this series before doing subsequent secondary research on the topic presented in this series. Please note that I was not tacitly positive about this series; within my lane as a critic for the art + craft, I highlight a few problematic aspects. Prior to posting, I did not research the scientific claims, nor fact-check the doctor whose work is spotlighted in this series.
It remains a great example of how a sophisticated listener, like me, can be fooled into thinking that pseudoscience is real, especially when portrayed as a ‘documentary.’
Please note that I still, absolutely, 100 percent stand by everything I write here about Happy Forgetting and Phonograph. Both of those series are incredible, and well-worth your time.
Critically Yours, Samantha
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Happy Forgetting
This series produced by Ruxandra Guidi and supported by the Soros Equality Foundation dropped last fall. It’s an anthology podcast about racial justice in America; a show built around a theme rather than following a personal story or unraveling a horrid crime.
Anthology concepts can be successful if they’re built around a compelling theme, a strong idea, and some solid voices—which must match the weight and heft of the topic. When it’s not all of these, they tend to taste a bit like the meals my kids hate most, what I call “kitchen catchatori;” a streamlined reappearance of what’s left in the fridge.
Happy Forgetting is like a chef’s tasting menu rather than reimagined noodles.
I missed listening last fall because I was focused on serialized stories by November, winding down my annual listening to get ready to define the Bingey List. But now it’s January, and the new shows are just starting to roll out, so I have the chance to double back and make sure I didn’t miss something worthwhile. I’m glad I did.
Happy Forgetting is a series built on the stories and essays from an incredible lineup of people: recent Pulitzer-winning Yohance Lacour (You Didn’t See Nothin), John Biewen (Seeing White), Allison Herrera and Adreanna Rodriguez (Tribal Justice), Salifu Mack (Resistance), and others.
This list of folks is an all-star cast of the podcast world. Seeing them brought together under one roof felt like a reason worthy of an anthology all on its own. But what makes it work is the strength of the theme.
After the week we’ve just had these stories feel more urgent than ever.
I like a show where the title explains exactly what it’s about
Happy Forgetting does that, but it also presents a riddle of sorts. While it sounds like a cheeky play on words, it’s a complex term, coined by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his final book Memory History and Forgetting. Ricoeur’s concept outlines that people who have experienced war and trauma (perhaps in the founding of a society) posit that it’s reasonable to ‘forget’ that experience, in order to ‘sublimate’ their anger.
But there’s work that must go into this process of ‘forgetting.’ It might be a physical memorial, a reparation that’s paid, a tribunal or something that allows someone to confront the past. The idea is that it’s a ‘confrontation’ of sorts, this allows society (or a smaller grouping of humans) to ‘reduce’ their anger, or move past it, which enables the process of “happy forgetting” that event in their history. He views this as something that can be positive and constructive.
When I step back to take in a long view of the horizon, Happy Forgetting gives me hope that narrative podcasts will become part of our culture and our collective memory. Maybe some ‘happy forgetting’ about the recent podcast election cycle could go on the docket.
Phonograph
(formerly known as Before it Had a Theme)
From another of my favourite Resonate conversations with Lauren Passell, she flagged Phonograph for me, while opening her podcast app, turning to face me with her eyes blinking quickly, and said what I would also soon feel: “I’ve got another one for you, and I love it, but mostly I’m jealous that someone thought of this before I did!”
After an exceptionally long pause, Phonograph launched with a few episodes in 2018 before grinding to a halt in 2019, podcast industry folks Rob McGinley Myers and Britta Greene sit down at the mic to tear down different episodes together. Piece by beautiful piece, clip by clip.
Their insights are infused with the kinds of things you know if you’ve been an insider for the better part of a decade. Their talking points are fascinating, sometimes controversial, and are always filled with supplementary details and back story. I appreciate that they play the actual clip they are discussing so you don’t have to remember it on your own. But mostly, what draws me to this is that they go to the depth that I crave, but mostly miss, with most of the reporting and writing about audio.
The descriptive term I’m reaching for here is that this show offers a critique, an intelligent, critical discussion, about narrative audio, which is the reason that I launched Bingeworthy. McGinley Myers and Greene discuss details of production, the narrative choices, the way the show is delivered, and how it makes us feel after we listen. It’s full of all the small details that we listen to, but don’t always hear.
The show launched with the concept that they would wash their nerdy audio hands in the vast archives of different This American Life. Evidently, there is a rich archive to work with here…but the re-launch has brought about a slightly expanded mandate. So far they’ve also examined Start Up and Love + Radio, before circling back to familiar TAL terroir.
The discussion around two pieces from the 2014 era of Love + Radio reminds us that there’s a podcast-specific critical language to draw from. We are well past the point of needing to solely lean on written conventions, or screenwriting techniques, to describe how narrative audio is made. We have our own examples of how to do it well. There’s a language and a pedagogy of work to build on from within this industry. Phonograph is doing this paleoarcheology here to unearth these bones, and piece together our very own version of Lucy.
I might go so far as to say that—especially at this point of massive upheaval in the industry—if we want to look forward, we need to look back. It’s time to carefully examine more of the early narrative pieces to see more clearly the narrative audio conventions, techniques, tricks, the wins and losses, that have helped to build the form into what is now, two decades on.
If we view the podcast industry using Tuckman’s Model (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing), we can see the “Storming” phase (roughly from 2010-2014), as a time when new conventions and concepts were being rapidly created. There were old radio rules to draw on, but the first job was to break all of them, as the new conventions were being defined.
2014 was a time of wild creativity. And it’s a good time to look back on to see how old rules of radio were being broken (intimate first-person POV), old ideas were being re-introduced in new ways (use of telephone audio mixed with studio sound), and when the original old-timey ways that radio was made (using live scored music) were being reinvented in new and creative ways.
Can’t wait to hear more from this re-born series.
The Telepathy Tapes
The catchy cover art for this series taunted me when I came across it in late November. I was like: I should listen to this…but I just can’t make myself begin another series. It was closing time for me. This is why I would never advise launching a series past November. By that point, I had capped off listening to 50 different series, and frankly, I needed to retreat into the written word over the holidays to give myself a break. Call it a survival tactic.
I purposely didn’t read anything about it—not even the short description. So when I finally allowed myself to dive into this one in the new year, if you’ve listened, you will realize why I was shocked. Because, it is shocking, mind-bending, almost nascent, on another level.
Somewhere I had also caught a social media clip that showed that for a brief moment in the post-election insanity, The Telepathy Tapes had managed to unseat Joe Rogan for its habitual #1 spot in the Apple listening charts. Wow, I thought. Only Kylie has managed that…not a narrative series. What is this thing about?!
If you plan to listen, I might advise closing this tab and heading over to your fave app and diving in, no spoilers.
But if you’re there already, let me repeat the wild ride that is the premise of this series. The Telepathy Tapes calls on you to imagine life, maybe all of consciousness, slightly differently. No small order, and with the choppy editing and rookie production mistakes, it’s not easy sledding to get to the end. But yes, it’s worth it.
In short, The Telepathy Tapes is something of a scientific experiment that proves an audacious conceit that the autistic community has understood for decades—but has been silenced and repressed—some non-speaking folks, who are generally part of the ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) community, can communicate via telepathy.
After imbibing the first episode, I panic-texted two close friends of mine, who both have two children on the ASD spectrum, one of whom is deeply involved in the autism advocacy community in Canada. Had they had heard about this show? Were their communities buzzing about this? Neither had.
The series shares a thorough investigation, centered around Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a retired MD, neuropsychiatrist, and psychotherapist, whose work is the centerpiece of this series. The series explains how her credentials were stripped after when she published some of her early results to support this idea. This series allows her life’s work to be remounted for the world to see, and helps achieve her life's goal of helping non-speaking individuals to get the education, the care and the support they actually need.
The Telepathy Tapes is the story of when producer Ky Dickens teamed up Dr. Powell to document how non-speaking folks can communicate using completely non-verbal means, via telepathy, with their mothers, their caregivers, their educators, and even with each other. Take a moment to swallow this thought before you move on. And it should be noted that these folks aren’t just communicating basic needs. They are eloquently raising deep and profound ideas, about complex subjects and social scenarios. This series prepares us to see this community of people who transcend their physical and verbal abilities.
As many big projects do, it began as a small idea that grew into a massive concept. Season 1 is told over 10 episodes, while the adjoining website is helping to crowdfund for the forthcoming documentary (you will note in the tape that much of this was actually filmed, not only recorded, as Dickens is primarily a documentary filmmaker). On the feed, Dickens is already talking about a Season 2.
The goal of this series is no smaller than seeking recognition and proof of vast intelligence for an entire segment of our population. But to get there, she also breaks down our collective understanding of how consciousness works, why conventional communication might be only one small aspect of the way humans have evolved…and then maybe even the theory of life itself. If you’ve seen Interstellar, imagine that wall in the house that separates one dimension from another.
While the series clearly scores a touchdown on many levels—it got me to re-conceptualize every corporeal thing around me—I feel like Dickens could use a kicker to try to get this ball through the goalposts to score that 2-point conversion.
But from a wider perspective, this series is an example of the importance of how audio can emancipate an idea, and then build a community around that concept. Dicken’s work here has vast potential, and it can do work that is deeply in need of getting done to help the rest of us Muggles understand that people in the ASD community need support, education, and respect, not hand restraints and tranquilizers.
I stuck with this series for that promise; not because of the production values. The editing was choppy and disruptive. When I started listening, I kept checking if I had accidentally set the speed to 1.5…something I rarely do. I wondered if the show had been edited with one of those AI plugins set to erase any silence longer than 0.5 seconds.
All of this gives the net effect of drinking from a fire hose. There are almost no moments to let these audacious concepts sink in, maybe wander off inside my imagination, as I listened to some well-timed music, before being bombarded with another deep and complex thought. For the first bit, I really needed this. Eventually, I stopped hearing the jarring edits and became accustomed to showing up in a new room, rather than allowing the time to walk down the hall, turn the corner, and enter the next room. Maybe my brain sped up? Maybe I began to anticipate it…maybe I was able to see this on some other plane of consciousness. Whatever it was, I got over it and listened until the last last episode.
Were it not for the crazy, wild ideas, I might have given up. But like Happy Forgetting, which is almost doing “the work” to get more important stories out into the consciousness, and like Phonograph, which is considering the importance of criticism in the world of narrative audio, I’m now ready to begin my listening journey for 2025. Bring it on.