What Is A Narrative Podcast, Actually?
Offered in a tantalzing Listicle format!
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When I began this newsletter, in time for International Podcast Day on September 30, I put my goal out loudly in front: To help make narrative podcasts a thing.
Not that they are not a thing already. They were, most certainly, long before I started writing about them.
But my goal here is different. I want to help make them a thing that’s more widely known and recognized, outside of the interior echo chambers of the folks already involved in the industry.
My hope is that this newsletter, by actively working to reach a wider audience, it could help contribute to the body of critical analysis of narrative podcasts. And that if we keep calling them that name, narrative podcasts, the name will stick, in the way that indie films or pickleball have…to people who only see Marvel and Tom Cruise films, likewise to all racquet sports enthusiasts. And these efforts will help grow the industry, from the outside in.
So what are narrative podcasts, actually?
Here’s my working definition:
They’re all non-fiction. They’re all original. They’re all serialized. They’re all driven by a singular, spectacular, narrator.
I built a preliminary playlist, of the 12 series that, to my mind, helped to define this storytelling format. These series have all chipped in to build convention and style. They’ve also helped to build an industry.
I made sure to include well-known and less-well-known series [find here as a playlist]:
Serial, Season 1
The Habitat
StartUp, Season 1
Not By Accident
First Day Back, Season 1
Finding Richard Simmons
S-Town
The Heart mini-series No
Alone: A Love Story
The Dream
Dear Franklin Jones
1619
The above list, I would hasten to say, were not the first to make podcasts, or even narrative storytelling podcasts. They weren’t even the first to experiment with the format norms that would come to define narrative podcasting.
To that end, I would put a different list forward. Here’s another list, this one of radio shows and proto podcasts, that gave birth to the format of serialized narrative podcasts (from the first list):
This American Life (began in 1995)
Wiretap (on CBC, created and hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, from 2004-2015)
Radiolab (began in 2002)
The Moth (1997)
Radio Diaries (1996)
Snap Judgement (2010)
Planet Money (2008)
99% Invisible (2010…Roman Mars went on to found Radiotopia in 2014)
Philosophy Bites (2007)
Song Exploder (2014)
The difference between this list, and the former, is that all of these were around and well-established before 2015.
Lots of them began as radio programs/experiments (This American Life, Wiretap, Radiolab), or were part of a wider cultural movement of live storytelling or community radio (The Moth, Radio Diaries). All of them can trace roots back to Transom.org, which was founded in 2001, as a community gathering and training institution for the podcast industry.
All of them, definitely and certainly, have helped build this industry, brick by brick, story by story. The companies that were founded in this timeframe were built by the people who created this storytelling niche; they trained the people in how to make them; they founded the distribution channels that exist; and they made a business case for the industry to grow by finding the audience that fell in love with podcasts.
Many of these institutions have arguably been putting out seminal narrative podcasts all along, as single episodes. True, true and more true.
But where I’m going to pull this apart here for a moment is that while the second list has helped to grow and build the industry and the appetite for the serialized stories told over multiple episodes amounting to many hours of the first list, they also run on a different business model, using different production schedules.
Many of them remain part of the radio landscape, but now also have a podcast component (which has in most cases eclipsed the radio from whence it came). These shows and the companies that run them have trained and educated many of the working producers in the industry today.
And also true that these founding podcast series are responsible for nurturing the podcast-listening audience, and then, slowly, they helped to change the way people consume stories for entertainment (or edutainment, a term I don’t love but it is illustrative).
The audience wanted more content, longer stories that dove further into a realm unknown before.
The audience didn’t know it at the time, but it would turn out, they wanted to be drawn into a story as a cultural event, helping to solve murders and exonerate or re-try wrongfully convicted criminals.
And that is the fertile ground that was prepared, just in time from 2015, when Serial was released.
These lists have been on my mind this week as I prepare some lecture notes for a class at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU, formerly Ryerson), where I’ve teamed up with a professor in the Geography & Environmental Studies Department to teach these First Year students how to make a short narrative podcast piece, based on their ideas and thoughts that come up after reading the book that looks at eco-anxiety called Generation Dread, by Britt Wray.
This week I’ve been doing the not-small task of trying to define, in a small and contained space, what a narrative podcast is, and then (see the jazz hands go up) How to make one!
Phew, it’s got me dancing around…because when I make these lists, I can see just how many years, and cumulative decades of experience have gone into these different series.
I’ve done this to help distill this down to its binary components, for the students, who may-or-may-not know how to create audio, let alone edit it and sculpt it into a story…I will let you know later if it’s all a grand experiment that has failed.
But for me, to understand how to make something, you have to understand where it comes from. And the origin story of narrative podcasts, broken down here by salient concept or stand-out creative approach, is my attempt to understand the creative etymology of the narrative podcast format so that I can begin to teach it.
So, going back to my first list, here it is again. But this time I’m going to include the specific attribute that I think these different early series brought to the format-defining party. Please, jump into the comments below to debate, detract or add to this discussion. Constructive comments only, please.
Serial, Season 1
The undisputed OG narrative podcast; unfolding story and true crime templates born
The narrator became a character in the story, not just the one who narrates the stories for and with others
Limited run series
Each episode builds off the last
The concept of restorative justice, or re-opening cold cases, became a cultural reality after the success of this series.
The Habitat
Host/narrator is embedded in the story and brings it back for the audience
The story takes you to a faraway place to make listeners feel like they are there
Human interactions are compelling and the story unfolds around them (much like a soap opera)
Limited-run series not about true crime are attractive to listeners
StartUp, Season 1
The ultimate I-Did-It ergo you-can-too format. Host takes you inside an event (starting a company) to make listeners feel invested in his dream—to build the company Gimlet—so that others would go and do the same thing (build companies in the podcast world). The job of this podcast was not only to tell Alex Blumberg’s story, but to build an industry. It worked.
Use “radio formats” of tape gathering: The story travels outside the studio and out into the streets to interview people. Makes the story feel alive and present.
Not By Accident
Sharing a personal life story; documentarian Sophie Harper wants to get pregnant as a single mother by choice.
Deep use of audio diary as a way to share personal moments
Verité-style of footage, brought from sort-of mundane life moments
A feminist story, a women’s story; women are a key demographic of the narrative podcast industry
First Day Back, Season 1
Documentary film technique; Producer Tally Abecassis came from the documentary film world and imported those production techniques
The episodes are set up as documentary film scenes
A linear narrative with no fixed ending
Another chapter in the feminist chronicles (new mother wants to go back to work)
Finding Richard Simmons
Humour! This series is done with tongue firmly planted in cheek
Almost absurd, it pushes over and back on the line of real-not-real (a line that Jonathan Goldstein and David Sedaris have well-defined over the years)
Go and get that story (even if you’re not really wanted there). Reporter antics play out here
S-Town
The blur between audiobook and podcast went live here
A new level of narrative was struck here…both in the way that it was written, and reported. This story MOSTLY features Brian Reed. The narrator as subject in the story takes another leap forward here to be the star
Looooooong episodes. You CAN make these things to be one hour long and people will still listen.
Alone: A Love Story
Fourth-wall is broken down. Writer/host Michelle Parise speaks directly to the listener
No tell-all moment is too small, or too big, inside the story of a dissolving marriage
Chapter 3 in the feminist chronology of narrative podcasts; this story is clearly told from the woman’s point of view. Women are listening and growing and building this storytelling format…because they listen as a unit. Stories for them and about them.
The Heart mini-series No
As a wider series, The Heart tells stories about sex and sexuality, bodies feelings and desire full-on. It’s sexy without being pornographic. It’s not always polite and grandma-ready.
The prescient, brave and brilliant mini-series “No” was first published in May 2017. Canada had already reckoned with the Jian Ghomeshi accusations of 2014 and then the trial in 2016…the hashtag #MeToo blew up in October 2017.
Inclusive, non-binary, queer, not-polite stories getting wider audiences
The Dream
Unfolding mystery, debunking an existing structure, discovering hidden meaning to something
Expansion of the mystery genre again, and not in the direction of true crime
Involving of friends and family on the quest, particularly with the telephone
Dear Franklin Jones
The Debut of the cult-or-not sub-genre (every 10th podcast is about a cult nowadays)
A family portrait, but one that blurs the line between memoir and history of a social movement
1619
Published as a multi-media piece as the 1619 Project by the New York Times in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of when it is thought that the first enslaved Africans landed in British North America (specifically here, Virginia). This also showed the media business community that podcasts are a key component of telling stories over multiple platforms
This podcast takes the lid off the box of that history, as it was generally taught in schools, is not always correct. Or accurate. Or true.
This series help to further cement the importance of voice and representation: the narrator telling the story needs to be authentic and connected to the material. Not just a great journalist. Not the Voice-Of-God narration from yesteryear documentaries. Nikole Hannah-Jones does this with gravitas and grace.
A podcast can stir shit up. 1619 ended up at the center of a wider cultural and political debate about how intertwined, exactly, slavery was with the founding colonies of New England. Although this series went on to win a Peabody in 2019, the series became a lightning rod from all angles and all sides about the role of slavery in the founding of America.
If you’ve got some more ideas or attributes to add to this list, do reach out, either by responding to this email, or in comments.
For me it’s exciting to watch an industry literally growing before our eyes, in real-time, and it’s fascinating to look under the hood to see what the engine is built from.
Thank you for reading this newsletter…it started from a list of 0 and it has grown by 50% every month. Thank you!!!
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AND, don’t forget, reach out to me if you’re in indie podcaster looking to submit your work to the Tribeca Audio Festival (which you should!)
COMING UP Get your eyes ready for this amazing series, by the one and only Nancy Updike, with Jenelle Pifer: