When I say the word Marvel, what comes to your mind?
Let me guess, larger than life characters, expansive landscapes and that iconic call to action music of the Avengers assembling.
But what about a murder mystery in which the main actors are two detectives with no superpowers who are investigating a series of gruesome murders in a small town in Alaska?
Doesn't sound like much of a superhero story but this is the premise of Marvel’s first scripted podcast show called ‘Wolverine- The Long Night’.
The podcast released in 2018 was the comic giant’s first bet into the podcast space and it partnered with Sticher, an on-demand podcast platform, to create the show that at the time of launch was exclusive to Sticher Premium users.
What sets the podcast series apart, considering the subject matter, is the fact that it draws a lot of inspiration from two unlikely podcasts called S-Town and Serial.
If you haven’t heard these podcasts before then you must but for our purposes, let me give you the context- both these podcasts are investigative, crime dramas whose narratives are significantly built on witness testimony.
It was a bold move by Marvel to go ahead with this and what was even bolder of the creators was that listeners hear Wolverine, voiced by Richard Armitage, for the first time much later in the series. Wolverine’s role is of the primary suspect and as such is second fiddle to the detectives.
The result is that for the first few episodes, Wolverine is only mentioned in third person and that builds a lot of anticipation (check out the trailer below) so much so that when you hear Wolveirne's voice for the first time, it's quite the moment.
“As a team, we reference Jaws a lot. In the movie, you don’t see him all that much, but everyone’s talking about the shark. There’s all this fear and mystery. Your imagination starts playing games,” said Dan Fink, executive director of development for Marvel New Media.
After Jaws, everyone was scared to go into the water, because you couldn’t see the shark. And so by creating this elusiveness [about] who Wolverine truly is as a comic book character, we were like, ‘Let’s bring this back, and slowly have him come back out of his shell,” said Fink.
It’s interesting to note that if Marvel hadn’t taken this approach, the podcast could still have made waves and maybe won the awards that it did because the franchise certainly has the fans and Wolverine is a rich character deeply embedded in pop culture.
But the thing is, whatever Marvel does is pop culture or better still, whatever Marvel does can become pop culture.
Breakdown- Many podcast listeners would have heard shows like Serial while many (often new ones) wouldn’t have. By using this format of gritty storytelling, Marvel, the king of mainstream content, opened doors for other creators to really push the boundaries with non-linear and unconventional storytelling that often takes the listener to dark places.
The Wolverine podcast got a second season called 'The Lost Trail' launched last year that is quite to different to its predecessor & its got a lot more of Wolverine but continues the work of high-quality storytelling mixed with great soundscape design.
I rate the script of the second season superior to that of the first season but the soundscape of the first season is better in my opinion. You can see how Marvel fine-tuned the balance in the second season and they have done a good job at that.
Here is Benjamin Percy, the show’s writer for the second season, talking about the unique space that podcast occupy when it comes to storytelling -
“If you see the way a novel works, you are feeding the audience information but they are conjuring the characters on their own, it requires a major leap on the audience's behalf.
In a movie or TV show, everything is supplied to them. Podcasts occupy the gray zone in between, a sort of shadowlands where you are giving them just enough with that sound effects like drips of a faucet in the corner or the noise of an air conditioner wheezing".
"The audience is almost like an author in themselves and they have to take the leap”- Percy
Key Takeaway
While podcasts are yet to find their stride in India, you don’t need to build a certain number of content assets or listenership before you try out this kind of storytelling.
The podcast medium has its own set of challenges and those can be measured in the first few seconds or few minutes of an episode. That is the slot you have to make it or break it.
So if you as a creator are thinking of holding back...
Don’t.
You can listen to the Wolverine podcast -> on Spotify, Sticher or wherever else you get your podcast.
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