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    Netflix Builds a ‘Squid Game’ Universe as It Awaits a Second Season

    A reality show and a live experience are two ways of keeping the dystopian series in the public eye. Is the original’s bleak message being diluted?On the same soundstage where Bob Barker lorded over “The Price Is Right,” “Squid Game” is coming to life.On Wednesday, Netflix will unveil its latest live experience, based on the dystopian hit show in which desperate South Koreans competed in a brutal contest of simple schoolyard games for a prize of 45.6 billion won (around $38 million). Winners moved closer to the money. Losers died. The live attraction mimics both the popular iconography of the series — the massive piggy bank filled with cash, a giant animatronic doll named Young-hee, the sterile white dormitory — and the childish games.For $30, fans of “Squid Game” will compete in some 70 minutes of play, with moral twists and turns and six group activities, including the schoolyard race Red Light, Green Light and a nonlethal version of the series’ terrifying Glass Bridge challenge, which forced contestants to choose between two clear squares for each step across a bridge. If they chose incorrectly, they descended hundreds of feet to their death.To feel even more like a character on the show, customers can buy a tracksuit for $50 and wear it during the experience. There is also a $100 V.I.P. ticket option: In a nod to the original, you can watch the unfortunate masses compete in the games while you sip cocktails in a swanky lounge.“It’s all the fun without the death,” said Greg Lombardo, Netflix’s head of live experiences.A game called Harvest Festival at Netflix’s live experience, which is scheduled to open to the public on Wednesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesNetflix plans to expand the live experience into other cities, but no additional locations have been confirmed. It’s one of several “Squid Game” adaptations that Netflix has planned in the hope of keeping viewers engaged during the long gap between the show’s first season, which debuted in September 2021, and its second, which is filming in South Korea and will come out next year.One is an unscripted English-language competition show, “Squid Game: The Challenge.” Its first five episodes debuted on Nov. 22, and a second batch became available on Wednesday; the final episode will arrive Wednesday.Also coming soon is a video game in which players will be able to compete with characters from the series. A virtual reality game is already available, and in Brazil, Burger King has been offering “Squid Game”-themed food combos in four cities. (Care for an umbrella-shaped onion ring to go with that shake?)The brand offshoots follow a formula that Netflix has employed successfully for other popular shows, like “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things.” A “Stranger Things” play that the streaming service helped develop will open in London’s West End on Dec. 14.The expansion of intellectual property like the “Squid Game” brand, however, is getting more scrutiny in Hollywood. In recent years, the closest an entertainment studio could get to a sure thing was a franchise spun from a popular piece of intellectual property: A film begets a sequel begets a theme park ride begets a line of consumer products. Now a certain amount of audience fatigue has set in.Marvel films like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels” struggled at the box office. The recent Harry Potter spinoff, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” and the D.C. Comics film “The Flash” also underperformed. The industry has been forced to ask: What deserves franchise-building attention, and when is it too much?“I’d say in general when you have I.P., if you just do too much of something, that can dilute what it is,” Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, said in an interview. “The other thing we look at is, are you being true to the DNA of the show and why people loved it but expanding that connection?”Losing competitors are marked off at Squid Game: The Trials. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe reasons that Netflix is trying to expand “Squid Game” are obvious. Not only is it the most-watched show on the platform but unsanctioned merchandise from the game, including tracksuits and Young-hee dolls, began selling almost immediately after its debut. Netflix now works with two global partners to meet the demand for the green athletic wear, especially around Halloween.Influencers have also capitalized on the show’s popularity. Last year, the YouTube star MrBeast enlisted 456 contestants to compete for $456,000 by playing tug of war and Red Light, Green Light. The video of the content generated 112 million views in the first five days online.With that kind of interest in an outside version of a real-life “Squid Game,” Netflix decided the time was right to try to capitalize with a reality show of its own, but in English, so as not to confuse audiences.“I was very curious how people would react to those games, the situations, the moral dilemmas,” said Minyoung Kim, Netflix’s head of Asian content, who was responsible for bringing the South Korean show to the service.The contests inspired by “Squid Game,” which is shooting its second season in South Korea, include Red Light, Green Light. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesStill, some question whether a reality show based on the South Korean filmmaker Hwang Dong-hyuk’s bleak view of his country’s class struggles and the global inequities of modern-day capitalism should exist at all.While “Squid Game: The Challenge” debuted at the top of Netflix’s English-language TV list with 20.1 million views and the original show vaulted back into the Top 10, reviews of the reality series have been scathing. Most criticized the 10-episode season for missing the broader critique of capitalist culture that is at the heart of the nihilistic series.A scene from “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a Netflix reality show, displaying an interim cash prize.NetflixThe show drew 20.1 million views when it premiered.Netflix“I see it obviously as an attempt to expand and monetize a franchise, but it seems particularly absurd given the anticapitalist message of the show,” said Miranda Banks, the chair of Loyola Marymount University’s film, television and media studies department.“‘Squid Game’ was a South Korean series, and it’s inflected with the politics of South Korean culture,” she added. “So part of this is not just a translation of the genre, but it’s also a translation of a nation. And in doing that, it is not surprising — and it’s arguably quite hilarious — that it becomes a pro-capitalist dream fulfilled.”The producers of the reality show are aware of the irony. But they said that by hewing as close to the original as possible — the same number of contestants (456) and a life-changing amount of prize money ($4.56 million) — they felt they could create compelling television despite the lower stakes.The live attraction is just one prong of Netflix’s campaign to expand the “Squid Game” brand.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“This was a drama that was so much about the fact that people who were eliminated were killed,” the producer Stephen Lambert said. “We were obviously never going to do that, but having such a big prize pot meant that when you were eliminated, your dreams died, and they were really big dreams that people had.”(The filming of the reality show has generated its own drama, with complaints from several contestants about “inhumane” conditions. When asked about the complaints, the producers said in a statement that they “take the welfare of our contestants extremely seriously.”)Still, does allowing fans to play along with a social satire cheapen its integrity?Ms. Banks doesn’t believe so.“I think that you probably have the fans who are there for the social commentary and the drama and the state of the game,” she said. “And then you have the people who love to play games. That might be different age groups. It might be different demographics.”A happy ending to Warships at Squid Game: The Trials. Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, the brand offshoots are doing their job — bringing renewed attention to “Squid Game” — yet she acknowledges the risks of creating so many versions that relied on the same source.“We have a hugely popular show that basically captures the cultural zeitgeist, but the doll, all the iconography, is carried through to the unscripted,” she said. “For us as a marketing team, how do you make sure that people understand that this is an unscripted version of that, and not the second season yet? You have to make sure that fans are following along: Oh, this is the unscripted version. Oh, this is the live experience. Oh, Season 2 is coming.“The fandom is there. It’s just making sure that we’re able to create distinct moments for each of those things.” More

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    Stephen Sondheim Leaves Rights to His Works to a Trust

    Stephen Sondheim left the rights to all of his work — including his contribution to musicals such as “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” as well as any unfinished shows — to a trust that will manage his estate.The trust will now determine what happens to the acclaimed composer and lyricist’s intellectual property, as well as all other property that he left behind when he died last fall.The plan for handling Sondheim’s assets is described in a probate petition signed last month and filed with Sondheim’s will in New York Surrogate’s Court. The filings were previously reported by The New York Post.The probate petition says that the estimated value of Sondheim’s personal property at the time of his death was between $500,000 and $75 million, but three estate lawyers advised caution in interpreting those numbers, which they said are often rough estimates, and which would not reflect the value of any property Sondheim had placed in a trust during his lifetime.“$75 million is the estimated ceiling of the value of the assets that were in his name, which pass under the will to the Stephen J. Sondheim Revocable Trust,” T. Randolph Harris, a partner in the law firm McLaughlin & Stern, said when asked to help interpret the filings. “Although it is possible that his estate contains other assets not passing under the will, it appears likely that the $75 million in the probate document filed with the court constitutes the bulk of his estate.”Sondheim, who had spent much of the pandemic at his country house in Roxbury, Conn., died in Connecticut on Nov. 26. The cause of death, according to a death certificate, was cardiovascular disease.The court filings include two documents — a will, written in 2017 with the estate lawyer Loretta A. Ippolito, that leaves all of his property to the revocable trust, and a probate petition, put together by Sondheim’s longtime friend and lawyer F. Richard Pappas, that lists beneficiaries of that trust.Alison Besunder, an estate lawyer at Arden Besunder, said reliance on a revocable trust was a common estate planning technique. “Among other benefits, a revocable trust affords privacy to public figures and celebrities in the administration of their affairs,” she said.The beneficiaries of the trust include a number of prominent organizations: the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Irish Repertory Theater and the Dramatists Guild Fund; the Museum of the City of New York is listed as a “contingent beneficiary,” but the filing does not specify what the contingency is. The trust will also benefit a Stephen Sondheim Foundation, once that is created.A dozen individuals are also listed as beneficiaries, including friends, neighbors and former assistants. Among them: Sondheim’s husband, Jeff Romley, and one of Sondheim’s best-known collaborators, James Lapine. (Sondheim and Lapine shared a Pulitzer for writing “Sunday in the Park With George”; their other collaborations included the musicals “Into the Woods” and “Passion.”) Also listed as beneficiaries: Peter Jones, a playwright who was once romantically involved with Sondheim; Steven Clar, who was Sondheim’s assistant; Peter Wooster, a designer who lived in a small house on Sondheim’s Connecticut property; and Rob Girard, who is Wooster’s gardener.“The probate papers tell you who the beneficiaries are, but not who gets what, and that’s the point here,” said Andrew S. Auchincloss, an estate lawyer with Schlesinger Lazetera & Auchincloss. “It’s being kept private.” Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting. More

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    How ViacomCBS's Content Deals Cost U.S. Taxpayers $4 Billion

    A new report details ViacomCBS’s use of a labyrinthine tax shelter to sell rights to its shows and films overseas.Dismissed by critics and devoured by fans, “Transformers: Age of Extinction” was the top box office film in 2014, bringing in $1.1 billion, with more than three-quarters of those dollars coming from overseas. More

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    Podcasting Is Booming. Will Hollywood Help or Hurt Its Future?

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPodcasting Is Booming. Will Hollywood Help or Hurt Its Future?A frothy adaptation market is just one sign of the rapid evolution of the industry. But some worry that big money will stifle the D.I.Y. spirit that has driven much of its success.Once seen as a marginal forum for comedy, tech talk and public radio programming, podcasting is one of the hottest corners in media, with Hollywood hungry for TV and film adaptations.Credit…Hudson ChristieFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIn November, production began in Los Angeles on a new series with the trappings of a potential hit.“Unwanted” is a buddy action comedy told with a wink, part “Beverly Hills Cop” homage and part Seth Rogen-esque genre sendup. It stars Lamorne Morris (“Woke” and “New Girl”) and Billy Magnussen (“Game Night”) as slackers who stumble on criminal intrigue in between bong hits, and its script is stocked with gross-out humor. (Sample line: “When I told you I dropped my phone in the toilet, that wasn’t the whole story.”)But “Unwanted” is not the latest Netflix comedy; it’s a podcast — or at least is starting out that way. The show’s first two episodes were released this week by QCode Media, a two-year-old company whose podcasts, with big names and high production values, are all but audio pitches for film and television. In July, for example, QCode introduced “Dirty Diana,” an erotic drama starring Demi Moore; by September, Amazon made a deal to turn it into a TV series.A frothy adaptation market in Hollywood is just one sign of the rapid evolution of podcasting. Though the format dates to the early 2000s — it is named after the iPod — podcasting has had an expansive growth spurt the last few years. Since 2018, the number of available shows has more than tripled, to around two million. Spotify, Amazon, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia and other major streaming and traditional media companies have poured about $2 billion into the industry, both chasing and fueling its growth. Celebrities, even former presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, are piling in, looking at on-demand audio as a key brand-building channel.Once seen as a marginal forum for comedy, tech talk and public radio programming, podcasting is one of the hottest corners in media. Yet its formats and business practices are still developing, leading producers, executives and talent to view the medium as akin to television circa 1949: lucrative and uncharted territory with plenty of room for experimentation and flag-planting.“It’s a new frontier, and we love it,” said Morris, who is also a creator and executive producer of “Unwanted.”But along with the optimism come worries that big money may stifle the D.I.Y. spirit vital to podcasting’s identity. Indie podcasters, used to an open and decentralized distribution system, fear being marginalized if the tech giants push through pay walls and exclusive deals. And as podcasting becomes big business, there is unease that the diversity of voices in our earbuds — never a strong suit of the industry — could be put at risk too.Nick Quah, who writes the Hot Pod newsletter, said that corporate interests tend to run contrary to what has always made podcasting interesting: the idea that anyone, anywhere, can bubble up and find an audience.“As we move forward and more of these platforms assume a stronger gatekeeping position,” Quah said, “there’s a strong possibility for new voices to get pushed out of the space. That’s a real concern.”Lamorne Morris, left, and Kyle Shevrin, are the creators of the buddy action comedy podcast “Unwanted.”Credit…Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesCracking the Code of the Podcast AdaptationFor the average listener, the most noticeable change in podcasting’s immediate future may simply be higher-quality shows.The influx of money — from tech platforms, advertisers and Hollywood — has attracted talent and driven spending on production resources. Podcasting executives say they are now flooded with pitches for new shows, often from A-list writers, directors and performers.“What you’re seeing now is this incredible flowering of creativity,” said Lydia Polgreen, a former HuffPost and New York Times editor who is now managing director of Gimlet Media, a Spotify-owned studio.For Hollywood, the podcasting space has become a farm team for intellectual property — where story lines can be tested out and promising material scooped up relatively cheaply. And with the movie business dominated by remakes, superhero franchises and other tent-pole mega-productions, the freedom podcasting provides is also refreshing, said Rob Herting, a former agent at the Creative Artists Agency who founded QCode.“I had gotten tired of the repurposing of old intellectual property,” Herting said. “I kind of yearn for original stories. This felt like such a great outlet for those, a place where you can go to be bold, experiment and move quickly.”QCode launched in early 2019 with “Blackout,” starring Rami Malek as a radio D.J. in a small New England town when the national power grid mysteriously goes dark. The company now has a portfolio of 11 series, including “Hank the Cow Dog,” a children’s show with Matthew McConaughey, and “Carrier,” a thriller starring Cynthia Erivo that showcases another feature of many of the best podcasts: intense, consuming sound design. QCode plans 15 new podcasts in 2021.Modest budgets and quick turnaround time enable more risk-taking. Most of QCode’s shows cost in the low to mid six figures to make, Herting said — orders of magnitude less than a film or TV project — and an eight-episode podcast can be taped in just a week or two. A comparable TV season, Morris said, could take two months to shoot.“Unwanted” is the studio’s first comedy, and Morris, who had a part in “Carrier,” said he was unsure whether it would work. For one thing, taping during the pandemic meant working remotely; using audio gear shipped to them at home, actors communicated via Zoom.But Morris said that his worries evaporated the first day on the virtual set. His character, Ben, is introduced pleading for an extension on his student loan, before he is revealed to be calling from a strip club. In the background, the comedian Ron Funches announces the dancers like a lascivious carnival barker: “Put your hands together for the beautiful … Desssstiny!”“I heard the raw playback and I was dying laughing,” Morris recalled. “You forget how immersive audio can be until you sit down and just plug in,” he added. “It really takes you there.”A successful adaptation into film or television can generate $1 million or more for podcast creators, far exceeding what most shows can collect from advertising. (The entire ad market for podcasts was estimated to be less than $1 billion last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.)But as the audience for podcasts grows — at last 104 million Americans listen each month, according to a survey last year by Edison Research and Triton Digital — TV and film properties are increasingly being adapted into audio shows as well.“It really is a two-way street,” said Josh Lindgren, a podcast agent at C.A.A. “It’s not just that Hollywood is coming to gobble up all the podcast I.P. and turn it into TV shows.”Warner Bros. is creating podcasts for Spotify based on DC Comics characters; Marvel is bringing a slate of podcasts, including a scripted series, “Marvel’s Wastelanders,” to SiriusXM. And Ben Silverman, the TV producer behind the American version of “The Office,” whose company Propagate Content made an oral history of that show for Spotify, has struck a new deal with SiriusXM that will establish a new franchise of entertainment oral history podcasts.“There are no rules anymore,” Silverman said. “If you are a creative person, you can go anywhere.”Walled Gardens and the Future of IndiesEmily Cross channeled her inner Seinfeld with “What I’m Looking At,” a podcast where she spends 20 to 30 minutes just talking about what she’s looking at.Credit…Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesHollywood deals have taken podcasting far from its shoestring origins. But the growth story has been building for years.The first mainstream hit arrived in 2014 with “Serial,” an investigative look at the murder of a teenage girl that was made by veteran public-radio journalists. The show — and the media attention it received — demonstrated the format’s storytelling and marketing potential.New stars were minted. Leon Neyfakh was a Slate staff writer in 2017 when he hosted the first season of “Slow Burn,” a meticulous examination of the Watergate scandal.As a writer, Neyfakh said, he was dispirited to find that long feature stories, which had taken months of work, would yield just a few minutes of “average engaged time” from readers. But “Slow Burn” fans would spend hours with the show, listening through to the end of episodes that lasted 30, 40 minutes or more.“People are just willing to give you more of their attention in podcasting than they are in print,” Neyfakh said.Epix turned the Watergate season of “Slow Burn” into a TV documentary and an anthology series starring Julia Roberts and Sean Penn is heading to Starz.Along with high-minded journalism came a flood of comedian-led talk shows, pop-culture gabfests, sex and self-help shows, and every niche dive imaginable. In 2017, Emily Cross, an indie-rock musician, was joking with a friend about the glut of podcasts when she hit on a “Seinfeld”-inspired idea.“What if I just did a podcast about nothing? A podcast about just what I’m looking at,” Cross recalled. “I was like: Actually, I really like that idea. So I just started doing it.”For 20 to 30 minutes each week, “What I’m Looking At” features Cross calmly describing random objects — her shoes, an apple, a box of toothpicks — in soothing detail, like a combination Zen relaxation ritual and conceptual art project. She earns no money from it directly (she has supporters on Patreon), but has built a small community of followers who email her comments after every episode.Shows like “Slow Burn” and “What I’m Looking At” exemplify the power and charm of podcasting — an intimate, technologically simple medium that can help forge a connection with an audience over any topic, weighty or whimsical.That power, and the lure of greater advertising dollars, has begun to draw big investment. In 2018, iHeartMedia, the broadcast radio giant, paid $55 million for Stuff Media, the studio behind hits like “Stuff You Should Know.” Last year, SiriusXM acquired Stitcher, a popular app and distributor, for at least $265 million. And in late December, Amazon agreed to buy Wondery (“Dr. Death,” “Dirty John”) at a price estimated at more than $300 million.Over the last two years, Spotify has paid more than $800 million for a series of podcasting companies, like Gimlet, the Ringer and Anchor. Spotify has also struck content deals with the Obamas, Kim Kardashian West, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the comedian Joe Rogan, whose no-holds-barred talk — including with guests like Alex Jones — has made him podcasting’s closest thing to Howard Stern.Spending has amped up competition among platforms, many of which have begun to protect their investments by keeping content inside so-called walled gardens, accessible only to subscribers. Spotify, which keeps some shows within its walls, has made it clear that it views podcasts as a way to attract new customers to its service. This month, Spotify said that a quarter of its 345 million customers listen to podcasts.“There is no question that podcasting is helping drive more people to Spotify than ever before,” said Dawn Ostroff, the company’s chief content and advertising business officer. “That’s really our goal at this point.”Consumers have grown accustomed to content arms races among streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. But in podcasting, it has led to fears of corporate Balkanization of what has long been a platform-neutral medium, in which anything but the most high-profile shows could effectively be suppressed.For now, there are signs of experimentation in the distribution model — or at least a hesitancy by platforms to wall off too much of their content. When “The Michelle Obama Podcast” came out in July, for example, it was only on Spotify, but within two months it was widely available, including on Spotify’s archrival, Apple.SiriusXM, which owns Pandora and Stitcher, has developed a hybrid approach to take advantage of the offerings on each of those three brands. The company circulates free podcast versions of some of its subscriber-only radio shows, like Kevin Hart’s “Comedy Gold Minds,” to Pandora and Stitcher, in part as marketing for SiriusXM’s paid service.“We love our three-barrel attack,” said Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM’s president and chief content officer.A Diversity Downside?Lory Martinez, whose Studio Ochenta makes “Mija,” said starting her own company may have been the only way to get her shows — and her multilingual, multicultural approach — to market.Credit…Carolina Arantes for The New York TimesLory Martinez, a Colombian-American podcaster, keeps her grandfather’s press card at her desk in Paris.He was a newspaper reporter in Colombia who covered the country’s Indigenous communities, and saw his role as bringing those people’s stories and perspectives to the entire nation. His approach inspired the mission of Martinez’s company, Studio Ochenta: “Raising voices across cultures.”Ochenta began a year and a half ago with “Mija,” a short-form podcast about the life of an immigrant daughter from Queens — modeled after Martinez herself — that was released in English, Spanish and French. It reached No. 1 on iTunes’s fiction podcast charts in 13 countries, and its third season, about an Egyptian Muslim character in Britain and the United States, will be released in April in English, Spanish and Arabic.“There is now more of a space for voices than you would traditionally hear, and they are appearing in podcasting,” Martinez said. “They’re not only making podcasts, they are starting companies. That’s what’s so exciting about this time.”But Martinez said that starting her own company may have been the only way to get her shows — and her multilingual, multicultural approach — to market.“I don’t think ‘Mija’ would have been made if I pitched it elsewhere,” Martinez said.Increasing corporatization, and the incentive for platforms to favor the shows they own, has intensified concerns that podcasts from underrepresented groups could enjoy less promotion, find fewer listeners and collect less advertising revenue — a vicious cycle that would repeat many of the failings of the old media model.For all the rah-rah talk of podcasts as a democratized medium, building diversity has been a slow undertaking. In 2008, for example, 73 percent of monthly listeners in the United States were white. In those days, “the average podcast you listened to was two white dudes talking about internet routers, and the audience reflected that,” said Tom Webster of Edison Research.Last year, Edison and Triton found that white listeners’ slice of the pie had narrowed to 63 percent, nearly mirroring the 60 percent of Americans who identify as white in census data. But the representation behind the microphone still lags.Juleyka Lantigua-Williams, a former journalist at NPR and The Atlantic who founded a production company focused on work by people of color, said that media and tech companies should look at diversity as a business imperative, given the country’s shifting demographics and the devoted audiences that companies like Studio Ochenta are building.“In the rush to secure the players that look like sure bets,” Lantigua-Williams said, “they are overlooking the creators who are really growing audiences that are going to stay with them five, 10 years down the line.”Yet some podcasters have found success navigating the corporate world from within. Spotify’s “Dope Labs” features two young Black women, Titi Shodiya and Zakiya Whatley — both working scientists with Ph.D.s — who came to podcasting via a Spotify-sponsored accelerator program, Sound Up, that aims to bring talent from underrepresented groups into the medium.“Dope Labs” mingles hard-nosed science and pop culture, with episodes on coronavirus vaccinations, racism in science and the history of Afrofuturism. The show has more than 100,000 followers — a midlevel hit.“People have this stereotypical box of what a scientist looks like, what they sound like and what they care about,” Shodiya said. “And we say, no. We don’t only care about these things. We’re really into fashion. We’re really into music. We’re really into food. We like to break the mold.”Sound Up awarded Shodiya and Whatley $10,000 and offered them training in basics like interviewing and using recording equipment. They were free to take their show anywhere, and Shodiya said they pitched it to other companies, which asked for changes the women did not want to make. They stuck with Spotify.“Spotify seemed to get it,” Shodiya said. “They really appreciate our voices and what we bring to the platform.”Opportunities for CreativityFor a star like Morris, the question of access to media is less of an issue. But even for him, podcasts offer a rare opportunity — to test a new idea, quickly and cheaply.“When you’re a creative person, you need an outlet,” Morris said. “You can’t always say, ‘Let’s go and make a $50 million movie.’ But you can sit down, record, say your idea out loud.”For now, many podcasters say, the money spent by platforms, media companies and advertisers has helped enable experimentation in the format and a sharpening of storytelling techniques.Early fiction hits like Gimlet’s “Homecoming,” from 2016, about a therapist working with returning soldiers, demonstrated some of the potential for innovation, with crosscut scenes and varying audio treatment of voices to indicate different environments — a high-tech take on techniques first heard in 1930s radio dramas. (“Homecoming” became a TV series on Amazon starring Roberts and then Janelle Monáe.)More recently, shows like Audible’s “When You Finish Saving the World,” a five-hour drama by Jesse Eisenberg, have tinkered further with narration and storytelling in long-form audio.“Unwanted,” Morris said, could very well be a film or television project. (A spokeswoman for QCode said no negotiations to adapt it have taken place yet.) The story, he said, was just one of “millions” of ideas that he and Kyle Shevrin, his co-creator and writing partner, have bandied about, and podcasting allowed it to become a reality.“It’s a proof of concept,” Morris said, “to say to the industry: This works, this is fun, this is something that can be done.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More