#audacious machine creative

Episode 1 is a special, extra-sized chapter, running just a little over 50 minutes. Most episodes in its sixteen episode (!!!) first season will be closer to 30-40 minutes, and they'll come out every two weeks on Thursdays once we get into the regular swing of things.

But that's once we get into the regular swing of things.

For this first week, we’re actually going to be doing three episodes - one today, one tomorrow, and one on Thursday. We liked the idea of starting with a quick flurry right up front, and these three work well as an introductory mini-arc to the series as a whole. The first episode introduces the premise and the characters. The second episode gives you a sense for some of the games we’ll be playing as the story unfolds. And by the end of the third you’ll have a glimpse at the scope of the Big Thing we’re doing.

If The Harbingers sounds at all interesting to you - and especially if you’ve heard and enjoyed Wolf 359 and Unwell and some of the other shows we’ve made in the past - I really think you should listen to these first three episodes that are coming out this week. I think if you do, you’ll be hooked - you’ll really want to know what’s coming down the pipeline, and we’ll have a grand old time laying out the story together. It’s an unusual format that we’ve ended up with for this one, a non-chronological puzzlebox mystery that touches a lot of people’s lives, but give it a moment and I think you’ll really fall in love with it.

It's a really big, strange, ambitious swing, and much of this year has been spent figuring out how to tell the story. So here's me DOUBLY grateful to the folks at the Tribeca Festival, who were some of the first people to believe in this show and encourage us to make it.

And as with everything that I do, The Harbingers is kind of a music show. Every episode is named after a song which in some way reflects, refracts, or informs upon the material in the episode. So OF COURSE there's an obsessive playlist for the series. It lives right here.

For anyone that would like to listen to the show with some other audio fiction fans, I’m actually going to be doing Listening Parties over on my Youtube channel for the first three episodes! On each release day this week, I’ll be doing a little stream so we can all listen to these together, starting at 8:00 PM Eastern. Here’s the link for the first episode, here’s the one for the second episode, and here’s the one for the third one! Tune in if you’d like to hear the episodes and comment about them in the chat!

Plenty more to say about this one, but I think at this point I should let the work speak for itself. So I’ll just close by saying… it’s nice to be back here. Launching a new fiction show, one that will (hopefully) go on for years, telling a big, sprawling story about characters who grow and change and evolve and surprise and disappoint and do a million other things. Making something with my talented friends. Setting off on the start of a long journey.

Deep breaths. And here we go.

Episode 1 of The Harbingers, I’d Love to Change the World, is now available wherever podcasts can be heard.

The first season will be recorded over approximately 16 recording sessions between July 2025 and March of 2026 in the Rogers Park area of Chicago. All roles will be paid at $25/hr for both rehearsal and recording.  This is a non-SAG production.

A pilot for The Harbingers is a 2025 selection for the Tribeca Festival. We are currently considering actors for all roles in The Harbingers. You may be invited to read for several roles during callbacks, including roles other than those you originally read for.     

About The Harbingers:

​​In the wake of a world-altering magic incident, the only two living magicians wrestle with how we got here and what happens next.

When Adam Blackwell and Amy Stirling met, they immediately clashed. They were both grad students studying a long dead language, academic rivals, and brief paramours - though they’d really prefer if everyone forgot about that last thing, thank you very much. Then they became the only people in the world capable of doing magic. Over the course of the next five years, they became global superstars, objects of adoration, scrutiny, and fear.

Until one day, Amy baits Adam into doing something incredible and terrible. The world's only two magicians are inextricably linked and now have to answer some difficult questions. Is this the right way to use this power? Have they done irreparable damage to the world? And above everything else, what are they going to do next?

About the characters:

We are excited to consider all kinds of people for these roles. All races, gender identities/expressions are encouraged to audition for whatever role catches your interest.

Adam Blackwell

The Most Powerful Man in the World

Adam is young (late 20s-early 30s) but the very definition of an old soul. He's careful and calculating, double checking the math on practically everything he says and does. He is energetic and genuinely generous. He has both boundless enthusiasm and a real talent for talking about the smart things he's doing in his work. Most people find him to be a kindly, reassuring presence. A few people think he's a conniving son of a bitch. The truth is that he's both - less of the former than he tries to project, more of the latter than he'd care to admit.

Adam has usually been the smartest person in whatever room he finds himself in. He can usually think his way out of any problem, and can confidently bluff his way out of a lot of the ones he can't just think his way out of.) At the same time, he can be a little culturally myopic - he's the sort of person that will read two books a week, but go a full year without reading any fiction.

For all of his steady presence and bookish professor persona, there is a real sense of ego, entitlement, and even anger to Adam. He’s smart, he's put in the effort, he's done the work - it's time for everyone to be quiet and let him tell them how it's going to be. 

Amy Stirling

The Silver Witch

Amy (Late 20s-early 30s) has spent all of her life trying to do two things: get people to take her seriously and have fun. It is the sisyphean curse of her life that these are often in opposition. Still, Amy refuses to get discouraged - she will do great work, she will make people see how talented she is, and she will look great while doing so. If anyone's displeased by any of this, it's their problem.

Amy is an excellent judge of character, and an even better cataloguer of people's wants and needs. She probably wouldn’t call herself manipulative- she’s just VERY good at helping people understand what they really want. 

Amy is impulsive and hot-headed - though it often doesn't look that way purely by dint of her on-the-fly decision-making being so good. She loves dancing until 3:00 AM at music festivals, and has wandered through the woods high as a kite on more than one occasion. She firmly believes that Taylor Swift's Red is the first great artistic masterpiece of the 21st Century, and will happily spend forty minutes explaining why.

Claudia Skinner

Senior Partner, Skinner, De Vries, and Wiseman

Claudia Skinner (Early 40s) could have easily inherited a life of idle leisure from their father, an enormously successful lawyer. Instead, they went to work. There's a proper way of doing things, and they’re going to do things the proper way.

Now one of the senior partners and head litigators at the firm, Skinner earns astounding amounts of money each year by being an absolute master interrogator. Almost everything they do during a deposition - from odd humor and an irreverent tone to harsh rebukes and sharp, biting criticisms - is carefully designed to disarm. It is this quality - along with their commitment to exhaustive research and encyclopedic knowledge of the law - that makes them such a good lawyer.

Still, for all their coldblooded maneuvering, there is a humanistic side to Skinner. They’re set for life financially, so when they take on a client it's because they believe in the case. They believe in the best version of their client, and think they can be of help in getting them there. And as much as they would like to pretend that all their strange humor is just interrogation tactics, a lot of it actually comes from something their father taught them: "Things are never hopeless if you can still find a way to laugh about whatever's going on."

About Audacious Machine Creative:

Audacious Machine Creative is a fiction podcast studio and production house based in Chicago. Previous work includes Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery (Winner 2021 BBC Award Best Podcast), World Gone Wrong, and Our Fair City.