TV Eyes Podcasts’ Profit Potential Despite Content Spending Pullbacks

When Aaron Mark first pitched a TV adaptation of Empanada Loca, his Sweeney Todd-inspired one-woman play about a Latina fighting gentrification in Manhattans Washington Heights, Hollywood producers thought he was nuts. Then he turned the show into a Gimlet podcast called The Horror of Dolores Roach, and they decided he wasnt that crazy after all. Blumhouse won TV rights to the podcast in a bidding war, and casting began.

The resulting TV series, starring Justina Machado as the titular weed dealer turned killer masseuse, debuted July 7 on Amazon Prime Video proof, as Mark likes to note, that Dolores Roach is unstoppable.

We ended up making a television show based on the podcast, which is really drawn from material I created for the television adaptation of a one-person play, he said. Its the most bizarre thing.

Dozens of podcasts have been turned into TV series, and hundreds more have been optioned and are either awaiting or undergoing series development, according to Talking Audio, a Variety Intelligence Platform special report examining the state of podcasts and audiobooks and their crossover opportunities in TV and other media.

The popularity of podcasts has grown by leaps and bounds since the creators of Ira Glass This American Life public radio program birthed a spinoff podcast, Serial, nine years ago, providing plenty of potential fodder for Hollywood to mine for TV. Cementing the potential of longform audio after the shows three-season run, The New York Times would soon pay some $25 million for Serial Productions, the company behind the runaway hit.

In the years since, even as the podcast sector overall has begun to retrench along with the rest of the entertainment business, the appetite for adaptations hasnt dimmed, according to execs and producers contacted by Variety for this article.

We knew as soon as we had done the play that there was more life for this character, says Mark while recounting his failed first attempt to sell an Empanada Loca TV show. In 2016, people thought I was completely out of my mind, but I had all this material for what was to be the serialized version of this characters story.

Mark drew upon that material while creating the 2018 podcast then transformed Dolores yet again for Amazons seriocomic streaming take. Mimi ODonnell, who produced the stage production of Empanada Loca Off-Broadway and initiated the podcast adaptation after she moved to Gimlet, is executive producer on the Amazon show, with Daredevil alum Dara Resnik serving as co-showrunner alongside Mark. Gloria Calderon Kellett, who worked with Machado on Netflixs One Day at a Time remake, came aboard as exec producer during the pilot phase.

The trajectory of Dolores Roach speaks volumes about the podcast adaptation boom in Hollywood. In the five years since Sam Esmails Homecoming adaptation bowed on the same streamer with Julia Roberts in a leading role, the audio format has become a go-to for prestige IP, offering so-called proof of concept to producers looking for their next big project. WeCrashed, Dr. Death and The Dropout are just three of the podcasts adapted for TV in the past year, with a second season of Dr. Death among those in the works.

We all know it started with Serial, said Patrick Macmanus, showrunner of Peacocks first season of Dr. Death and executive producer on the upcoming second season. [But] if you told me in 2013 or 2014 when everyone was looking at international IP and graphic novels, that radio, in essence, was going to make a comeback and become IP for TV shows, I would have said you were insane.

Serial hooked Macmanus on true-crime podcasts, and he found himself similarly engrossed by the advance episodes of Wonderys Dr. Death podcast UTA sent him. Top of his mind when he landed the Peacock gig: not disappointing fans of the audio series.

At their best, podcast adaptations can lean into a built-in audience, but there are no guarantees listeners will cross formats or that the program will translate well to TV. Producers and acquisition execs considering audio projects for adaptation assess story structure and sustainability to find the right projects to develop.

Whether its a scripted or unscripted podcast, a lot of the story is already structured, which lends itself to [TV] adaptation, says Jordan Moblo, executive VP of creative acquisitions and IP management at Universal Studio Group, who determines whether to acquire podcasts for creatives in the studios various divisions. There are episodes, cliffhangers and stingers. You can see how its laid out to be compelling and what does and doesnt work in the audio format to figure out what is going to work in the adaptation.

At Blumhouse TV, president Chris McCumber and his team work to assess how much life there might realistically be in any project before committing, and podcasts offer a testing ground that can help to gauge a storys longevity and creative fit.

I hear a lot of amazing ideas. But when we start digging in it, we realize there may only be four or five episodes is that worth developing? McCumber said. But when you hear a great podcast, its already proven it can be episodic and that the story has the engine and enough juice to last.

Listening to The Horror of Dolores Roach, he added, you knew right away that Aaron knew exactly who the character was and where the story was headed. It was wholly original. He points to the horror-comedy mix as a good fit for the company that last year adapted The Thing About Pam itself a podcast spinoff of NBCs Dateline coverage into a miniseries on the network starring Rene Zellweger.

Even so, there were creative adjustments made in the Dolores adaptation process. A new opening was added, and Mark took care to open up the world of the show because its no longer Dolores in the podcast whispering in your ear. Blumhouse ended up scrapping an hour-long pilot after determining the show worked better in faster-moving half-hour installments, suggesting theres still value in doing pilots for such adaptations.

Gaslit creator Robbie Pickering maintains its important to differentiate TV adaptations from their audio predecessors. For him, the first season of Slates Slow Burn podcast was more of a jumping-off point for his Watergate series than a roadmap.

You have to understand this is a different medium, says Pickering, who was working with Esmail on Mr. Robot when the producer had Universal option the podcast for him to adapt. The first thing I knew was that I couldnt do what the podcast did because that wouldnt make a good TV show.

Instead of devoting individual episodes to various players in the Watergate scandal, he built the Starz series around Martha Mitchell, wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, with Julia Roberts playing Martha and a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn as her spouse.

More recently, projects are facing slower momentum due to ongoing labor strife in Hollywood. Pickering was still fielding inquiries about possible podcast adaptations before the writers strike began and was developing one about Christian conservatism. I dont know if the project will still be there when we get off the strike, he said.

Regardless of what happens with labor walkouts, Wonderys Aaron Hart, who spearheads adaptations as head of TV and film, believes podcast adaptations are here to stay. His company, purchased by Amazon in late 2020, has an impressive track record of adaptations and aims to engineer podcasts so they can be readily adapted for the screen.

We see our miniseries podcasts, traditionally six episodes a season, as proof of concept for TV, said Hart. The attributes we look for in a good podcast naturally also apply to TV: strong characters and a propulsive narrative that can carry audiences from episode to episode. That care for good storytelling helps the company attract A-list talent before and behind the camera, he maintains.

I think were just at the start of this, said Hart, referring to the growth trend of podcasts being turned into TV shows.

Universals Moblo agrees the podcast adaptation trend has staying power. I dont see this going away anytime soon.

For ODonnell and Mark, the Amazon debut of The Horror of Dolores Roach closes another chapter in a lengthy collaboration. Ten years ago, Mark was inspired to write Empanada Loca after watching the cannibalistic changes gentrification was bringing to his neighborhood. And ODonnell has bittersweet memories of the one-woman show that inspired the series: It was the first play she produced at LABrynth Theater Company after her partner Philip Seymour Hoffman died.

My title is executive producer, but I feel more like a doula, says ODonnell, now head of scripted fiction at Spotify Studios, of the TV series. It feels like my life has come full circle in some way.

By the time he made the Dolores podcast, Mark said, he had completely given up on the idea of it being a television show. I dont know that the podcast would have worked if we had made it thinking this is going to be a television show. I think the podcast works because we decided to make the best audio production we could make.

Years later, his killer character finally has a TV series of her own. Says Mark, Its been a long and winding 10-year journey.

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