TV or not TV? That’s the podcast question
A title’s wild popularity no guarantee it’ll fly on the small screen
There really is a podcast for everyone these days. With more than 700,000 podcasts currently available to download from around the world, topics vary wildly from dental hacks (which sounds terrifying) through to the unusual history of gnomes (ditto).
Some podcasts obviously fare better than others and with the rapid popularity of anything comes the
inevitable — the television adaptation.
We’ve already had a trickle of popular podcasts being adapted for TV as networks grasp for new content. Last year saw true crime tale
Dirty John turned into a cheesy soap opera starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana, while the TV version of fiction podcast Homecoming managed to snaffle Julia Roberts as its lead.
We’ve recently had two more podcasts adapted for TV, with the subject of Serial’s first season being re-examined in The Case Against Adnan Syed, and the trio behind My
Dad Wrote a Porno getting their own
HBO special. The source material of these two shows couldn’t be more different — the murder of a teenage girl and one man’s discovery of his dad’s penchant for writing terrible erotica — but they do share one trait: their existence as a TV show is wholly unnecessary.
It’s very easy to see why they made this leap to the small screen, with each of these stories enjoying podcast downloads in the hundreds of millions. But, as the old saying goes, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
That applies especially to the fourpart documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed. Syed first came to international attention in 2014, when Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial documented his claims that he’s been wrongfully convicted for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, 18-yearold high school student Hae Min Lee.
Although Koenig ultimately couldn’t determine Syed’s guilt or innocence, the podcast was downloaded 175 million times and spawned countless theories as to who Lee’s killer was.
Now The Case Against Adnan Syed, directed by Amy Berg — who made West of Memphis, the acclaimed documentary co-produced by Sir Peter Jackson — has picked up the story.
The makers enticed Serial fans with promises of “ground-breaking revelations” that challenge Syed’s conviction — but there’s really not much new to see here.
While the show does reveal some additional information about the case and furthers Syed’s argument that he didn’t get a fair trial, that was a commonly held notion before the documentary aired, which makes the whole exercise feel a bit pointless.
Speaking of pointless, so too is the upcoming televised edition of My Dad Wrote a Porno.
For anybody not familiar with that particular podcast, it’s presented by Jamie Morton, a man who’s discovered his father’s been spending his retirement writing erotic fiction.
Morton uses each podcast episode to read aloud a chapter of his dad’s dirty books, with commentary by his friends Alice Levine and James Cooper thrown in for good measure.
Called Belinda Blinked, the novels detail the sexual exploits of pots and pans sales rep Belinda Blumenthal, and demonstrate that Morton’s father has no concept of plot, grammar or the female anatomy.
As you can imagine, it is frequently hilarious. It’s also wildly popular, with the trio taking their podcast on the road in a series of sold-out live shows.
It’s one of these live shows at London’s Camden Roundhouse that’s been filmed for TV and sees the gang reading a “lost chapter” of the book, in which Belinda goes on a raunchy team-building exercise for work.
It all sounds quite entertaining, but the fact remains we’re just watching three friends chatting to each other on some couches for an hour.
Admittedly, they try to inject some visual elements into the show, with Levine using a diagram to point out where the cervix can be located. They also include the audience, with one attendee providing a French accent and two others participating in the reenactment of an improbable love scene, a demonstration I was not nearly drunk enough to find funny.
MDWAP’s appeal has always been in the camaraderie between the three friends as they giggle their way through the smut and this charm simply gets lost when they’re doing it in a sold-out theatre for one of the biggest TV networks on the planet.
Still, it should prove a wee treat for fans of the podcast — and will ensure you never look at a work teambuilding exercise the same way again.
The Case Against Adnan Syed is available now on TVNZ OnDemand. My Dad Wrote A Porno airs Friday at 8.30pm on SoHo2.