Meet the two men behind the viral podcast series

What do you see? If you’re listening to Homecoming, the cult hit podcast from Gimlet Media, the answer is nothing. A psychological thriller set largely inside a mysterious corporate facility somewhere in Florida, the podcast’s story is relayed strictly through sound, even more so than other fictional podcasts of late, or the cliffhanger-loving radio dramas that preceded them. Seemingly cobbled together from found recordings of phone calls and therapy sessions, there’s not even a narrator to tell you where you are, or when.

For the podcast’s creators, Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, that meant everything depended on the characters. “You can’t hide behind cinematography or good-looking actors or costumes,” Bloomberg said. “You can’t have action sequences. You can’t have sex, really, in any kind of convincing or interesting way. The only thing you have is an engaging scene.”

So what did the Homecoming co-creators do when Hollywood came calling, hoping to transform their podcast into a full-blown TV series? In many ways, they took advantage of the (much) more robust budgets and cool new tools that premium TV series come with. But even with all this largesse, they strove to retain the podcast’s intimate, even claustrophobic, feel.

On an afternoon last March, between takes on the Homecoming set, the two described the transformation. For their secret facility, they constructed an enormous, two-story compound within a 36,000-square-foot soundstage, one of the largest here on the Universal Studios backlot. They enlisted Sam Esmail, the creator of the critically acclaimed dystopian thriller Mr Robot, to direct. And then there’s Julia Roberts, in her first TV series, ever. “I don’t know how we got her,” Horowitz admitted.

The result is the Amazon Prime series Homecoming, which has already been renewed for a second season. In the adaptation, Roberts plays Heidi Bergman, a caseworker charged with helping combat veterans readjust to civilian life. As a therapist at the Homecoming Transitional Support Center, Heidi becomes close to one of her patients, Walter Cruz (Stephan James), a veteran Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz, creators of the ‘Homecoming’ podcast. eager to get better, and butts heads with Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale), her condescending, insufferable boss.

Work on the TV adaptation began in earnest in December 2016, when Universal Cable Productions purchased the rights to the story and began sending out feelers for a director. Esmail, a fan of the podcast, which stars Catherine Keener (Heidi), Oscar Isaac (Walter) and David Schwimmer (Colin), initially balked at the idea of an adaptation, figuring why screw up an already good thing? After bingeing the show three times, however, Esmail began to see the possibilities, and not just because it shared many of the same themes — shadowy corporate machinations, creepy 24/7 surveillance — as his award-winning Mr Robot.

He saw it more as a throwback to the character-based thrillers of Hitchcock and De Palma, and a month later, after pitching his vision to Horowitz and Bloomberg, he got the job. As it turned out, Roberts was also a big fan of the podcast, and the two met over FaceTime to talk about the possibility of working together.

With the cast and crew largely in place, Horowitz and Bloomberg began writing the show’s first season. “We had a huge advantage coming out of a podcast, because we felt that we had already tested this at an elemental, molecular level,” Bloomberg said.

Both creators struggled to keep the show from spinning out into some largescale “genre, paranoid thriller,” Horowitz said. “The natural tendency is to go bigger, but the solution was really to go more human.”