Does a great story have to end?
Comparing some fiction podcasts and their trajectories
The Black Tapes vs. Limetown
Why do you hate comic books and comic book movies?
Okay, you probably don’t, if box office numbers can tell us about the average person. I don’t hate them either. But I can tell you some reasons that I don’t love them.
The one reason that I want to focus on here is the fact that they are basically neverending stories (and not the good kind, where a horse dies in a swamp). The business model of comics has been to keep selling the exploits of a finite—if large—number of characters to people, for several bucks a month, over and over. They live, fight, and sometimes die, only to be resurrected. They also show up in other timelines and different genres, so you can get a horror Batman and a noir Batman and a steampunk Batman and a campy Batman, all to your taste.
All of this dilutes, to my mind, the meaning of a story. If a story doesn’t have one settled arc, how can we call it a story?
And now I’m going to contradict all of that.
An annoying accolade
At present, my podcast-listening time is generally spent on nonfiction. (The Jeselnik and Rosenthal Vanity Project, The Ezra Klein Show, and Conversations with Tyler, with a sprinkling of Seforim Chatter, are my go-tos.)
But at one point, I mostly listened to fiction podcasts.
In 2019, Facebook—on its very weird Facebook Watch service—aired a TV show based on one of those podcasts that I had listened to, Limetown, with Jessica Biel as the lead.
The fact that someone was willing to make a TV show out of a terrible podcast was pretty annoying to me.
The podcast Limetown was a fiction true-crime podcast, trying to sound similar to nonfiction true-crime podcasts like Serial. Limetown’s story was about the disappearance of the inhabitants of the town of Limetown and a podcast host’s investigation into that disappearance. It was supposed to sound real, as if an actual town had disappeared and someone actually made a podcast about it.
The reason that I say that it was terrible is partly because the story was not great. It was cliché, and while it had twists, they didn’t manage to make it that interesting, in large part because the characters weren’t interesting.
But my poor view on it is mostly because the acting and direction was terrible. The podcast was supposed to sound as if it were a true-crime podcast, but it sounded like a badly run school play. There wasn’t any possible suspension of disbelief for the audience. It didn't sound true to life at all.
And that led to my biggest disbelief, later, that someone gave them money to convert that into a TV show.
Monsters without end
About the same time I was listening to Limetown, I was also listening to The Black Tapes. Both podcasts began airing in 2015, and both were fictional podcasts. But The Black Tapes actually sounded like a real podcast, and it never wavered from sounding believable (besides for one voice actor in an early episode, playing a minor part; listen, I’m getting down to the nitty gritty here).
The basic plot of the podcast was pretty clearly ripped off of The X-Files, though altered in some significant ways. Alex Reagan, a reporter from a fictional radio station goes looking for stories of the supernatural and hears about Dr. Richard Strand, a skeptical debunker of such stories, who himself has a mysterious history. Rather than searching out her own stories, she starts reinvestigating the incidents that Strand has looked into and was unable to debunk, which he calls the Black Tapes.
The skeptic-vs.-possible-believer dynamic mirrored what The X-Files did, though with a twist, in the sense that the skeptic here was the one with the mysterious history and was hiding things.
(There’s also a will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic that developed in later seasons…which would either appeal or annoy, depending on your feeling about those kinds of storylines.)
While The X-Files used aliens as its throughline amid all of the monster-of-the-week episodes, The Black Tapes used the supernatural and occult in the same way, and the monster-of-the-weeks stayed in that realm as well.
And despite having new stories and new investigations in pretty much episode, the voice acting and careful planning and editing of each episode made them sound like an actual reporter went out there and interviewed real people about scary things. And some of the episodes were really scary, in large part because they sounded so real.
(Two subsequent series produced by the creators of The Black Tapes, Tanis and Rabbits, which used some characters from The Black Tapes and also explored occult subjects, were less successful in sounding like actual podcasts. They broke realism in too many ways.)
One lovely part of the podcast was the weird [and apparently free for the creators] theme song that mentions a “devil just behind the door” and “the kingdom of the universe,” which fits nicely with the podcast’s themes.
During the series, the clues to an overall mystery kept mounting, and for listeners, the direction was pretty clear: horrifying demons with upside-down faces were going to be invading our universe soon. A terrifying book, a sound that kills people, and creepy portals to other dimensions were all involved. The fun banter of the reporter and her professor frenemy aside, something dark was coming.
But…
…after three seasons, the series ended. It had a sort of personal resolution for the main characters, but the upcoming apocalypse that the series had been hinting to was never dealt with. A whole series of mysteries were left unanswered, as well. How did all these different clues and pieces of the whole actually fit together?
We’ll never know. But does it matter?
Wanted: An ending—or maybe not
I think that it might not matter. The ride alone, to my mind, was worth it. Resolution is maybe not really necessary for an enjoyable bit of entertainment.
The reason that in this case resolution was not entirely needed is clear. Unlike comic book stories that create characters whose identities and fates are remade endlessly, The Black Tapes created defined, interesting characters who were clear and unified, and put them in the middle of intriguing stories. Because we eventually identified with the characters, the fact that those intriguing stories never really came to a conclusion didn’t matter all that much. And unlike Limetown, the characters felt real.
The podcast Rabbits, created by the same team as The Black Tapes, is a good example of what happens when you don’t have interesting, defined characters but do have a conclusion. The podcast, which revolved around a mysterious online game that causes people to disappear, had a vaguely presented and somewhat emotionless protagonist and mysterious secondary characters without a lot of, well, character. And it came to a conclusion in the first season, if a weird and somewhat annoying one. It wasn’t satisfactory, at all.
Had the meandering storylines of The Black Tapes been brought together, it’s not clear that the team who made the podcast could have done so in a satisfactory way. It’s easier to threaten the apocalypse in a podcast than to actually present it, for one thing. And their other efforts suggest that they weren't talented enough to finish stories well, in the same way J. J. Abrams isn't. But the characters they made and the web they spun, even incomplete, was enough.
I guess I would compare it to my favorite book series. Each book is satisfying on its own, and if G-d forbid the author shuffles off the mortal coil and joins the choir invisible I will still be able to reread and enjoy what he has produced to this point, but I still want the satisfaction of the threads coming together and getting that big payoff at the end. But there are of course series that were so busy trying to reach the end that they never got around to the beginning or the middle, and while I read till the end for the sake of knowing, I didn’t enjoy the journey or even the payoff.