If you’ve listened to a good podcast in the past year, chances are high that a studio is already in talks to adapt it for the screen.
The podcast-to-TV trend kicked into high gear earlier this year with the release of shows like Hulu’s The Dropout, Apple TV+’s WeCrashed, Peacock’s Joe vs. Carole and NBC’s The Thing About Pam — all of which were prestige, limited series based on podcasts of the same name. At the end of 2021, audiences saw Peacock’s Dr. Death and Apple TV+’s The Shrink Next Door.
In some instances, such as with WeCrashed and Dr. Death, the showrunners were given early access to the podcast to see if — and how — they would be interested in adapting the story for TV.
“I was sucked in from the first episode of the podcast,” says Patrick Macmanus, who adapted Dr. Death for Peacock.
To create the fictionalized series and inform conversations between characters, Macmanus says he relied on the mountain of research conducted by Wondery and journalist Laura Beil, who hosted the podcast of the same name. “[Beil] hacked through the jungle for us,” Macmanus says. “We had thousands of pages of depositions and testimony.”
For WeCrashed, creators Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello also benefited from a plethora of existing reporting about WeWork and interviews with co-founders Adam and Rebekah Neumann. The team also embarked on its own research, which included interviews with dozens of former employees, prospective investors and friends, as well as a private meeting between Jared Leto and Adam Neumann. The WeCrashed team’s research proved to be so thorough that, according to Eisenberg, one of the people who was portrayed in the show actually questioned how they were able to replicate a conversation he had verbatim when “no one was there.”
Eisenberg says, “That was my favorite compliment that we’ve gotten so far. It was so important to us to get it right, and that’s why you spend hours on the phone with someone or you’re reading through transcripts.”
Some showrunners did take artistic liberties in bringing their adaptations to the screen. For The Thing About Pam, creator Jenny Klein says she leaned into the visual medium by creating these cutaways — “Pam Visions” — that helped illustrate the absurdity of the main character’s lies and contradictions in a way that the podcast could not. “They build over the season, becoming more and more theatrical as Pam’s lies become more and more over-the-top,” Klein says. “It’s a representation of her over-the-top nature.”
In retelling stories based on real-life events and people, the showrunners who spoke with THR also noted the ability to offer a more three-dimensional portrayal of a story’s characters and villains, even if they’re not necessarily aiming to redeem anyone or justify their actions.
Georgia Pritchett, who adapted The Shrink Next Door, says she was a fan of the podcast before she boarded the project and knew she had several questions about the relationship between Martin “Marty” Markowitz and his therapist, Dr. Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, the latter of whom was ordered to surrender his license in New York in 2021 for violating the minimum standards of care in his relationships with patients.
“So many people said to me, ‘Oh, Ike is evil,’ or ‘Marty’s an idiot.’ It felt very judgmental of both men, and I wanted to approach it without blame or judgment for either of them,” says Pritchett.
Joe vs. Carole showrunner Etan Frankel says he wanted the show to avoid treating Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin like “caricatures” — especially because viewers may have already formed opinions about both after Netflix released its documentary Tiger King at the start of the pandemic.
“We hoped to portray them as real people who had been through traumatic events, and not make excuses for them,” says Frankel, “but at least give the audience an opportunity to know who we thought these people were and see them as human beings.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
