Hedgehog-Owned and Operated

Vesta Clinic

Travelling Light

Ghost Wax (I think)

Neighbourly (kind of)

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: Violet Liu's ship blows up, and she's rescued by a band of smugglers who become embroiled in the mystery of what happened. This series is complete, although I'm still in the first season.

InCo: Nova is just trying to make a delivery when she ends up rescuing a prince. This one is complete, and again, I'm still in the first season.

WitchPunk: In post-apocalyptic North America, a team is trying to make a delivery only to discover there's something strange about their cargo. The first season is airing right now, with Episode 4 releasing today.

I've been staring at this question for about five minutes and I honestly don't know what to say for this. 😅

There's certainly been some changes, but most of them have been fairly superficial. (Venture capital and Hollywood money rushing in, then rushing out, that sort of thing.) The core of it remains fundamentally the same: it's an amazing medium for getting a story out there, but boy howdy it's tough to make a show that finds an audience that's big enough to pay for the cost of production, let alone make any kind of a profit. There's a lot more shows now than there were ten years ago, which I think is a net positive. We've all spent a lot more time listening to audio fiction, so our formal literacy, storytelling sensibility, and structural familiarity have all gone way up. That's a good thing.

At the same time, you do notice some interesting conversations happen around the peripheries of the medium. I feel like for the past two years I've been hearing a lot about increased spatial sound design, and the desire to hear scenes where everything sounds completely consistent to the way it'd sound if you were there all the way through the scene. Which is a great tool up to a point, but so much of audio drama's power comes from the way in which its elasticity conceals and then dramatically unfurls information. There's a point at which totally realistic, spatially realized design takes away from that voltage - imagine Wooden Overcoats if you always had to hear Antigone breathing and moving around if she was in the room, for example. It's a lot of sacrificing what's cool and powerful and unique about the medium in order to hit an arbitrary mark. I, for one, remain skeptical of its utility.

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