What is the appeal of radio drama?
It lacks film’s faculty of spectacle, it is bound to technology, unlike the print book, and TV’s visual nature combines all of radio’s strengths with the virtue of permanence. Streaming beats all of these on the logistical fronts of speed and distribution. Where then, does that leave sound drama?
The answer is “imagination.” So long as there are people who like to use their imagination, there will be fans of radio drama.
Radio plays tend to have a simple, fairy-tale aesthetic. The nature of broadcasting creates limitations for both the content of these stories and the form of these stories. The internet and AI audio could change both. What this has generally meant for writers of sound drama is a constant urge to keep dialogue concise and plots simple, but to make characters and settings of unfailing interest. But the limitations of sound drama enable a certain type of charm in the stories told in this medium. The intrinsic boundaries of the form lends itself to stories characterized by a kind of intellectual elegance.
Radio drama relies intensely on the audience using their imaginations, and requires radio dramatists to tell stories with clarity, economy, and wit.
Radio plays in the tradition of American Old Time Radio are a very strange category of pop culture. Their British cousins have their own national eccentricities, but American and Anglo sound drama both share certain similar quirks which I believe characterize all examples within the medium.
In Handbook of Radio Writing by Erik Barnouw, published in 1939, the author of that book points out that radio drama was (as it still is) intrinsically limited by several logistical handicaps: The mandatory time limits on individual radio plays, the necessity of limiting cast sizes to four or five main players at the most, plus the content restrictions which come with broadcasting into private homes.
The restrictions Barnouw and others observe means that radio drama’s content (what the stories could be about) was severely limited to whatever a paternalistic managerial class decided, by fiat, was most broadly appealing to its listenership. These restrictions on thematic content, on top of the logistical problems of the other factors, were all but fatal to the medium. Controversial subject matter was avoided, wholesome denouements were enforced, and bland sameness prevailed. TV couldn’t steal audiences away fast enough.
But in the age of the internet, such censorship is nowhere to be found. Today’s audio drama producers, in the age of explicit podcasts and widespread indifference to moral standards, can literally tell stories about anything.
In my opinion, the dispensing with restrictions on content has not been properly exploited by the audio dramatists of the 21st century. An audio drama in the internet age might be able to have more smut and swearing, and perhaps openly discuss or dramatize war, politics, religion, sex, and the like, but the real possibilities which the era of Spotify and YouTube have to offer to sound drama have not, I think, been fully explored.
To this day, most new audio drama productions are unoriginal, uninteresting, derivative serials or miniseries which retain the core 30-minute, episodic format of American Old Time Radio. Yes, audio drama, thanks to the internet, can now tell stories about anything. But regrettably, the internet has barely changed how sound drama is told at all.
Beyond that, the prevalence of stories which demand an adult audience but insist on exploring those themes in a decidedly childish fashion is beyond tiresome. Filling an audio drama with death, sex, and obscene language doesn’t make it adult. It makes it illiterate.
I sincerely believe that the real possibilities which digital technology has to offer sound drama lies in the ways the form of the story can be changed. The internet’s infinite canvas could allow for the creation of a single, continuous audio drama of not 30 minutes, but 300 minutes. Sound drama has spent most of its history bound to the vice of miniaturization, just as film has gone through phases where the popular vice was gigantism. I’m personally eager to explore the possibilities of gigantism in audio drama, and that can be done thanks to both the internet and AI.
The dawn of AI audio, the application of which I take credit for pioneering, allows voice-acting, music, and sound effects to be fully synthesized. The writer, producer, director, sound engineer, casting director, and composer can now all be embodied in one person with a suite of very affordable software and a good laptop with high-speed internet. I produced Son of Yi, Son of Pangu, which has a runtime of 3 hours, on such a laptop at my desk in about nine months (it took some 300 hours of labor) for less than $2,000 in annual fees.
Can modern technology, by empowering individual radio auteurs and infinitely lowering production costs, help radio drama to transcend its inherent limitations by making possible an increase in the sheer volume of produced stories? Your guess is as good as mine.
This has been a long digression from the topic of imagination. I suppose my main point is that the fundamental limitations of broadcasting and the fundamental lack of incentives in streaming have blunted the potential of radio drama in the 20th century and stunted its aspirations in the 21st.
But imagination! What of it? Well, the psychology of radio demands a high degree of audience participation in a way TV does not. Marshall McLuhan identified radio as a “hot” medium, meaning that it requires a lot of effort from the audience, similar to the written word and print. But radio is also a high-definition medium, in that it focuses on and amplifies only one human sense: the ear.
In a radio drama, the listener has to fill in the blanks of the story. He has to figure out for himself what the characters and the setting look like. Recall our previous discussions about the subjectivity of radio drama. When I say that radio drama is subjective, what I mean is that the individual listener has more responsibility for interpreting the story than the storyteller has for communicating it. The onus is on the listener to imagine the story as he or she hears it, to conjure up in their mind, per the suggestion of the play, what is actually going on. The listener of the radio play, in short, is compelled to use his or her imagination, and to use it actively, frequently, and perhaps wildly.
The one class of people who can consistently be relied upon to love doing this is small children. Perhaps The Shadow has had the type of pop cultural staying power it enjoys because it was produced with ten-year-old boys in mind. Adventures in Odyssey most certainly continues to thrive in the new millennium because it combines intelligent subject matter and high production values with a thoroughly G-rated presentation which appeals not just to small children but to those children’s parents.
One of the funny quirks of radio drama, recognized as early as 1937 by James Whipple, was that younger listeners are more critical and skeptical of a radio play’s warmed-over plot and two-dimensional characters than any adult listener is.
What Paul McCusker and Phil Loller realized when penning the scripts for Adventures in Odyssey was that a successful radio serial should maximize thematic sophistication and totally banish obscenity. McCusker and Loller figured out that, in the case of the radio play, a story which has all the literary depth of a novel by Charles Dickens and all the charm and wholesomeness of The Andy Griffith Show would turn out to be wildly popular in comparison to all competitors. Dallas Jenkins, showrunner of The Chosen, is proving such a thing to also be the case with streaming TV.
All good sound drama must abide by a few general ground rules.
It must be clear in the stories it tells, avoiding confusion and prioritizing coherency. Sound quality as well as script quality are equal partners in that objective. It must also be concise, simple, and economical. Dialogue must be kept modest, with soliloquies having been considered bad radio technique for years. Such monologues are best reserved for critical dramatic revelations. While abiding by the limitations of strict order and simplicity, the story itself must make up for its limited scope by being witty and colorful. This is done by crafting quirky characters with unique experiences who believe, say, and do interesting things.
These limitations were applied in the Golden Age of Radio on top of strict boundaries on thematic content, which I have criticized. The vice of that era was an inordinate desire to avoid controversy. The vice of the present era is an inordinate desire to incite it.
Adventures in Odyssey is a model for happily avoiding both extremes. It (quite imaginatively) tackles thematic content of all sorts, including survivor’s guilt, frivolous lawsuits, and the conflict between tradition and modernity. But in addition to expert radio technique, Odyssey handles its stories without resorting to obscenity and shock appeal. It has all the intelligence and sophistication which is expected by listeners in the postmodern era, but it rejects the postmodern notion that a story cannot be interesting or compelling unless it is also lurid and vulgar.
Thus, we see the beauty of embracing the technical, logistical limitations on form which radio drama has always had and of cultivating enlightened, judicious sensibilities concerning content which radio drama has almost never had. In the age of the internet and AI, when there is so much room for flexibility in the area of form, a tastefully directed sense of what kind of content to employ will define whether or not today’s sound dramatists successfully exploit these new technologies. I believe that these same technologies will empower writers and producers who have similar sensibilities as McCusker and Loller to create the stories they always wanted to tell, but which had no hope of getting funded.
The broader conclusion of this chapter is that sound drama is, at present, an arrested art form. The only thing which can save it is imagination.
The shifting media landscape led to severe limitations at its beginning, while today’s utter lack of cultural and commercial investment leaves radio drama emaciated. The internet and AI working in concert could reinvigorate it, however.
But technological innovation aside, I believe that the key to reviving radio drama is to do what Adventures in Odyssey has done and play to the medium’s intrinsic strengths. A medium which relies on imagination must produce stories geared toward the most imaginative demographic of all: children. Counterintuitively, that means producing G-rated stories which appeal to both curious kids and curious adults. The democratizing potential of AI and a clever writer-producer (or a gang of them) with modest financial backing could be all that is needed to begin a New Golden Age of Radio, or perhaps simply a Golden Age of Sound Drama.
The traditional limits of radio drama resulted in the development of a dramatic aesthetic centered on brevity. High production costs have prevented the internet age from encouraging mass experiments with the form of radio drama, forms which defy the demand for brevity. But AI has the potential to encourage such mass experimentation with form by removing the problem of prohibitive costs.
I must emphasize: No amount of technological innovation will be of any use if the rising generation of AI sound dramatists does not marshal the faculty of imagination. That means more than being creative with how stories are told and what those stories are about. It means telling stories which will be enjoyed by the infinitely creative minds of the very young.
Levi Sweeney is an indie radio producer from Seattle, Washington, and a digital marketing student at Bellevue College. His debut radio play (sound movie?), Son of Yi, Son of Pangu, is available now on YouTube.