Adaptation is debut of Roberts on TV show

Listening to “Homecoming,” the cult-hit podcast from Gimlet Media, you see nothing.

The psychological thriller set largely inside a mysterious corporate facility in Florida is relayed strictly through sound, even more so than other fictional podcasts of late or the cliffhangerloving radio dramas preceding them.

Seemingly cobbled together from found recordings of telephone calls and therapy sessions, the podcast doesn’t even have a narrator to tell you where you are.

For the podcast’s cocreators, Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, that meant relying 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 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 come with premium TV series. But even with the largess, they sought to retain the podcast’s intimate, even claustrophobic feel.

For their secret facility, they constructed an enormous, two-story compound within a 36,000-square-foot soundstage, one of the largest on the Universal Studios backlot. They enlisted Sam Esmail (“Mr. Robot”) to direct the series. And they recruited Julia Roberts, for her first