Breaking & Entering: Could the Podcast Be the New Pilot? Interview With Producer William Stuart

This year the Golden Globes added a Best Podcast category, Netflix inked exclusive video deals with Spotify and iHeart, and Hulu licensed its first standalone podcast show. The industry has, with considerable enthusiasm and some sense of urgency, decided that podcasts are television now.

William Stuart, producer of The Rock, has a blunter take on what's actually happening. "This is where the studios are casting their net for new IP with a known audience," he says. “The podcast is not the end product. It's the pilot.”

Stuart created American Afterlife to prove it. A limited audio drama adapted from the bestselling novel by Pedro Hoffmeister, written by Allyson Dwyer (Arrow of Time) and River Donaghey (VICE News), and starring Scarlett Estevez, known for FOX's Lucifer, with 4M+ combined social followers. It charted number one in fiction and in drama on Apple Podcasts and received an Apple New Series feature within weeks of launch. 

Stuart was gracious enough to talk about the process, from idea to top podcast, and is now getting the material into the marketplace. If you’ve struggled with queries, agonized over decks, forced yourself to create bibles, or can’t afford to shoot a sizzle reel or short, you have a new option to prove to Hollywood that you’ve got a great idea.

If last year was the year of the short story as the ultimate IP, the podcast may be the next trend. Whether you’re listening to this article via earbuds or not, it’s time to tune in to this latest development.

Barri Evins: Admittedly, I’m not a huge podcast person, but I was really drawn in by American Afterlife. I intended to listen to just a few episodes, but quickly found it was like potato chips, you can’t eat just one! I thought the concept was terrific – the ground literally and metaphorically crumbling beneath your feet as the result of an apocalyptic earthquake. I love the complication of this determined young, female protagonist who's undocumented. I thought the actress was very compelling. And the sound design – wow!

William Stuart: We're getting a lot of compliments on that. It really immerses you into the podcast.

Barri: Absolutely. I got chills. I was fascinated by your concept of podcast as pilot. For you, which came first, the concept or the medium?

William: It started with meeting Dave Dean, who owns a large radio company that also produces content. For instance, when a popular musician dies, within 48 hours they're able to put together a radio program honoring that person.

He wanted to diversify, and we were talking about ideas we could do together. I have a number of IPs that I've been trying to push along. We were looking for something that could be a series, and I came across these books by Pedro Hoffmeister, the first in the series was a YA bestseller. I talked to him, told him what we wanted to do. He was already writing the second book, and now he's writing the third.

Barri: So there's more to come!

William: It's so hard to get anyone's attention these days that unless you have an amazing package for a film, a TV series, or a bestselling novel, you can’t even have a conversation about development. Knowing we wanted to do a TV series based on the book, I thought, what a great way to advance it by doing a podcast. Approach it almost like a feature, except for the visual part, and see what happened. Dave agreed, and they got behind it. That was very helpful because they have studios, sound design people, all the rest of it. All I had to do, really, was get the script written.

We wrote it like a TV series, with cliffhangers. Then we did the casting. We started going out to name actors, but got a lot of push back: "It's a podcast, why would I do a podcast?" I finally found Scarlett Estevez. She read the script, and loved it. I think she's really an up-and-coming star – the next Jenna Ortega.

Barri: And she has quite a social media following. That helps bring an audience along, right?

William: Exactly, yes, that helped a lot.

Barri: I’m very drawn to the approach you’ve created, and I know the ScriptMag audience will be intrigued by this new possibility. We used to go out with spec scripts in the golden, olden days, and people would read them and get back to you. Or you'd get a spec script and be expected to respond quickly. Now it feels like we're going ever further into an era of: "Read words on pages – oh no!” We're moving into pitch decks and sizzle reels and proofs of concept. I'm working with consulting clients on crafting all these marketing materials. Visuals speak volumes, and paired with minimalist, impactful words, can convey a compelling story. But in this day and age, the idea of saying, “Hey, you don't have to read any words, you can put earbuds in and listen to it on the treadmill at the gym or in the car” – seems like an enticing option.

William: Yes, absolutely – that's what we were focused on. As I reach out to studios now, I'm sending them a very short description, and the link to the podcast. People are – I wouldn't say they're running after me, but they're at least taking a look. The Last of Us is the prototype for our story.

Barri: That's a great comparison.

William: Buyers are still looking for a showrunner attached – someone with chops and a history of successful television. I've started reaching out to a few writers and making the podcast our pitch. We’re starting slowly, getting some traction, talking to management companies that have talent on board that also produce, because we'll end up partnering with somebody in the end to produce this.

Barri: One of the things that's exciting in the rise of the podcast is I think buyers are seeing this as a fertile area. To me, last year was the year of the short story on Reddit.

William: Ah, the four-minute read!

Barri: Indeed. What does that say about our ever-shortening attention spans? I remember a pitch meeting at CBS, quite a while ago and the response was: “We need stuff where there's ‘mental real estate.’” It means that the audience already knows it – we don't have to work to sell it to you except say: "Tune in at 8," because you know what you’re getting.

William: I remember being told at a studio, “We're looking for stuff that's ‘uniquely familiar.’” Which is sort of what those people were saying to you.

Barri: Yes! Do you think streamers might be inherently more open to the “podcast-as-pilot” idea than networks?

William: I think so. I don't know how much the networks, versus the streamers, want to deal with developing scripts. Some of them are very rich. They have deep pockets. They tend to say no very quickly, or move forward very quickly.

Barri: Your episodes vary in length, which makes me think that since you're not in a network environment where you need exactly this many minutes with exactly this many commercial breaks, you can focus on "what this episode needs," whether that’s 63 minutes or 29. Similarly, with the podcast, rather than backing into a rigid format, you broke episodes into what that episode needed to be.

William: Exactly – that flexibility is amazing. We haven't gone to a streamer yet, because what I understand is that I need a more developed pitch, even with this. We're working on finding someone to put together a five-page document, or a bible for the first season. We were limited by what we could do in a podcast. Obviously, in a series there'd be many more characters and situations.

Barri: Being able to say "the number-one podcast" in two genres – I don't know what kind of numbers that means, but that’s impressive. Do you think that carries weight as proof of concept, or is the focus on looking at the audience it drew?

William: We're talking hundreds of thousands, not millions. We didn't have a major actor. The book has a good following, but it's not a number-one New York Times bestseller. So, it has cachet, it has bona fides, but on a lower level – we have to push a little more uphill to get that attention. People are starting to listen; we've been studious about tracking listenership. Now, we're preparing the second season and want to give it a big boost while still trying to find the development venue. I think TV, although it could be a feature too.

Barri: It sounds as if you’re having to prove the podcast is appealing, when really, it's radio drama from a hundred-something years ago.

William: Exactly what I call it – old-timey radio!

Barri: And people were captivated by it back then! Both are dialogue-driven mediums. I'm just thinking that if you got your showrunner and were putting together more of these, I would certainly look at playwrights, or other writers who excel at dialogue. A lot of the best-known dialogue writers – Aaron Sorkin, Alan Ball, David Mamet – came from theatre as plays are inherently dialogue driven. That might be something to consider for ScriptMag readers who excel at dialogue.

William: That's true! Actually, we had two writers, Allyson Dwyer, a playwright, and River Donaghey.

Barri: Do you think this is something aspiring writers hoping to break in ought to think about as an avenue? It costs a lot of money to shoot – equipment rentals, crew, insurance – and requires production skills. But this seems like a more readily achievable path to begin to build a following to prove there's an audience for your story.

William: I think absolutely, yes. There are some very ambitious, talented writers out there. You could record this on your iPhone with a couple of people, use AI to get your sound effects. I think it's about getting ideas out there, and this is certainly a way to do it much more quickly and showcase a high-concept idea.

We were able to get it done quite quickly. We were experimenting a lot, but something like this can be done in a few weeks. The second season has a three-week schedule for ten episodes, and that's just based on people's availability – if we could get everyone in the studio on day one, we could do it in a week.

Barri: Wow.

William: Post – especially developing the soundscape – takes longer than recording the voices, but it's still lightning fast next to film or TV.

Barri: Do you think there are genres that work better as podcasts?

William: Well, the most successful ones are true crime. I think they appeal to large audiences.

Barri: There is certainly a huge appetite for that. I think there's always an added draw to true stories. Combined with a mystery and suspense, it does keep us on the edge of our seats. Prior to American Afterlife, the only other time I'd had that experience with a podcast was Crooked Media's Wind of Change, about a rock ballad that might have been engineered by the CIA to bring down the Berlin Wall. That kept me binging all night!

William: I think drama should have a life. Right now, we're looking at other genres – and building on our success – another drama that could translate into a TV series.

There's money in podcasts if you have a lifespan – if you can produce an episode every week, that's what advertisers want. A continual, loyal audience they can target ads at.

Barri: That's a wonderful insight. It was easy for us to understand in the television era – you wanted to get to 100 episodes to get to the truly lucrative syndication. I understand the week-after-week piece – do you feel pressure to sustain episode after episode, season after rapid season?

William: I think it's tough. It's more difficult with the path we set out on – following a young girl through an apocalyptic world. How far can you take that? There's a podcast called The Magnus Archives – it's been going weekly for a year and a half. Because they've been able to keep it going, they're selling merchandise.

Barri: Is there a specific audience that’s drawn to podcasts or is there no real way to define who podcasts most appeal to?

William: There's so much data out there, you can identify almost the birthday of who's listening.

Barri: Really?

William: Yeah. We found our audience to be about where we thought – 18 to 30. Some skew younger, fans of Scarlett's, down to 15. And then, people like yourself, who listen and say, “Wow, I've never heard something like this, I really like this,” and then go searching for other things.

Barri: It truly seems within reach for aspiring writers – a truly intriguing and attainable path – whether adapting their own IP or optioning someone else's. I think your concept – the podcast as a pilot – is brilliant, William. I wish you all the success. As you continue to move forward, I hope you’ll keep us updated.

William: I appreciate that. That would be lovely.

American Afterlife is streaming on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.