No Reservations and the podcast problem
I just wrote and deleted a massive post carefully outlining the current issue with the state of podcasting and how, over a span of 50 years, to make the medium as good as it can and will be.
The tl;dr is this - we are in the soap opera era of podcasting. Most all podcasts are low quality and exist to sell ads. Even some of the high effort ones.
In order to change that, a few things have to happen. Things like decoupling audio storytelling from journalism, making pro tools easier to pirate, and a lot of boring mental work to develop the "language" of the medium (just like film has a language, audio needs a highly developed one too).
The question of audio language is one I think about often.
Specifically, I think about what I call the "conceit of the microphone". Aka the fact that any story told in audio has to, in some way, address why the microphone is there and that somebody is operating it.
The conceit of the microphone exists mostly because of podcasting's journalistic roots. Podcast journalism is historically a first person endeavour. In Serial (the most popular podcast of all time) Sarah Koenig is the narrator, the storyteller, but also the main character and the person who literally holds the microphone.
The reason the conceit exists is because there is no other model. So in fiction, in documentary, in whatever, somebody, at some point, has to address the fact that they have a microphone. There are some ways to do this that are better than others. A common way is to hear the sounds of the recording beginning.
This is something that absolutely does not exist in any other medium. No other piece of equipment has to justify its presence (imagine if, in a documentary movie, every shot began with them focusing the camera for a few seconds - you'd go insane). So why does it exist in audio?
BECAUSE WE HAVE NOT ESTABLISHED THAT ANOTHER PERSON COULD POSSIBLE HOLD THE MICROPHONE.
I had this realization last night while watching No Reservations for the first time. We have no idea who is holding the camera. We know nothing about them. Their relationship to the person hosting the show is solely to document what they are doing. And it's assumed (at least I assumed) that neither of these people would be involved in editing this footage.
Which is to say that in film, the camera often isn't a character. They're there to be invisible.
From a story perspective that implication is huge.
Right now, every storytelling podcast tells the story to us. The fourth wall doesn't exist. We are an active participant. We have to be.
But the cameraperson stands in for us, the audience, what it'd actually be like to be there in the flesh. What we'd see. What we'd look at. What we'd hear. They allow us to see things through our own eyes. To be a witness. Instead of a participant.
It also opens up a whole level of artistry that doesn't currently exist in the medium. If the sound designer were the cinematographer, where would they choose to point the microphone? What sound would they collect? Who would they interview? For the most part we are letting journalists - people who tell stories with words - dictate those decisions for sound designers - people who tell story in sound.
If we decoupled the reporter and the audio recording, we'd open up a whole new world of possibility. We'd create a whole new kind of story. What would it sound like? I have no idea. But it'd certainly be something very new.